Muhammad Owais Qureshi is a cofounder of Dastgyr, the Karachi B2B marketplace that let small retailers order stock from manufacturers, distributors and wholesalers through an Android app, with next day delivery and buy now pay later credit. In its first two years it was one of the best funded young companies in Pakistan. In January 2024 it was the company that cut most of its staff.
His story is a compressed version of a cycle the country's startups have lived through. He launched in a lockdown, with his own money and a friend from university, at a moment when most investors had stopped writing cheques. He rode a record funding round and a place on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list. And he signed the company wide email that told hundreds of people their jobs were going.
This profile is written in the past tense where the facts demand it. Dastgyr has since described itself as a global B2B trade marketplace, but the Pakistani business that Qureshi helped build in 2020 is not the one that exists now, and what his own role is today is not stated in any public source this magazine could find.
A lockdown, a living room and $300,000
In May 2020, when Pakistan was in its first strict Covid lockdown, Qureshi and his university friend Zohaib Ali put a combined $300,000 of their own money into a B2B ordering app for corner shops. ProPakistani, which told the story in July 2021, reported that early supply operations ran out of a founder's living room and that team members made deliveries themselves. The name means helper in Urdu, and the company used it as its tagline.
Qureshi had the background for it. Profit, reporting the company's first angel round in August 2020, described him as a Careem and Airlift alumnus. He had been a founding member of Airlift, which began as a bus service in Lahore and later moved into quick commerce, and the early Dastgyr team came largely from there. ProPakistani added that Ali had worked on Airlift's launch and that Asad Qamar, later the commercial lead, was a veteran of Careem, Daraz and Airlift.
The August 2020 round was a six figure sum from angels in the United States, the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan, and the company's statement on it was unapologetically eager.
“It was, then, a no brainer to launch immediately!”
A friendship from LUMS
Qureshi and Ali both graduated from the Lahore University of Management Sciences with a BSc in 2014, according to the university, which said the two became close friends on campus. In April 2021 Forbes put both men, then 29, on its 30 Under 30 Asia list in the retail and ecommerce category.
ProPakistani reported at the time that the app listed more than 2,000 products, offered next day delivery and microloans, and had served more than 30,000 users. The product answered a real problem. Small retailers in Pakistan buy from layers of distributors, often on credit and with unpredictable supply, and a single app that promised stock, delivery and a payment term was an appealing proposition.
How the business worked
By mid 2021 Dastgyr operated in Karachi and Lahore. Retailers ordered through the Android app, and the company's own staff handled the movement of goods and of money between buyers and suppliers, with a 24 hour delivery promise and a telephone helpline. By its own account it had fulfilled orders worth billions of rupees since its formal launch in August 2020, though it disclosed no revenue.
Funding followed in steps. After the angel round, the company said it raised an undisclosed seven figure seed round from international venture firms in February 2021. Profit later put its seed at $3.5 million and the earlier angel round at $500,000. The founders said they wanted eventually to reach the wider Middle East and North Africa region.
The largest Series A the country had seen
In June 2022 Dastgyr announced a $37 million Series A, which ProPakistani called the largest in Pakistan's history. Bloomberg, as cited there, reported that VEON Ventures, the investment arm of Jazz's parent company, led it and supplied about 40 percent. Other backers included Zinal Growth Fund, DEG, Khwarizmi Ventures, Oman Technology Fund, Cedar Mundi Ventures, Reflect Ventures, Century Oak Capital and SOSV.
The company said it was used by about 100,000 shops in five cities, and set out plans to enter 15 new markets in Pakistan, expand overseas within the year and move into building materials such as cement and steel. Qureshi told ProPakistani that the company hoped to become a unicorn within a few years. Ali was bolder, describing an ambition to build an Alibaba for emerging markets worldwide. Jazz chief executive Aamir Ibrahim pointed to synergies with Jazz's roughly 75 million subscribers and with its mobile wallet, JazzCash.
A target like that shapes a company. A unicorn valuation means growth that outruns the underlying economics of delivering goods to tens of thousands of small shops, and it assumes an investment climate in which the next round is always available. That climate did not last.
The email of January 2024
The ambition did not survive the downturn. On 18 January 2024 Profit reported that Dastgyr had cut its workforce of more than 500 people by 50 to 60 percent, according to one employee, having already let go of almost all its warehouse staff before the new year. Other outlets put the cut at 80 percent or more. The news came in a company wide email signed by Qureshi.
“Today, we have had to make a very difficult decision to reduce our team.”
He blamed the global and local political and financial climate and an unforeseen economic crisis, Profit reported, and the email offered two months' salary as severance and mentioned share buybacks. The cofounders did not respond to the paper's requests for comment. Profit's sources pointed to unstable fundamentals and heavy cash burn, in a discount driven marketplace squeezed by distributors, wholesalers and well funded rivals. By then the company had raised more than $40 million in total.
The cut was part of a wider purge of Pakistani startups that Profit was documenting at the time. Cheetay was reported to be weighing a shutdown, the payments company YAP had let go nearly all of its Pakistan staff, and Paymob was cutting up to half of its team. Airlift, where Qureshi had started, had announced its own shutdown in June 2022 despite raising $85 million.
Where the company stands now
In August 2024 the company announced on its blog that it had gone global, with sellers in Kenya, Brazil and China serving buyers in North America, Europe and Asia. The post spoke of hundreds of thousands of customers and sellers and carried no founder's name. Qureshi's LinkedIn profile and Crunchbase list him simply as cofounder, and investor pages at SOSV and Orbit Ventures give the chief executive title to Ali, not to him.
The record, then, leaves a gap. Whether Qureshi still runs day to day operations is not stated in any public source, and the company has not said how many people it employs today. A reader should treat the present role as unknown.
What the story leaves behind
It would be easy to read Dastgyr as a cautionary tale about growth at any price, and some of the people it let go may well read it that way. It is also an account of how a small team came to run a nationwide distribution network from a standing start in the worst months of a pandemic, and of how quickly the terms of that bet changed when capital stopped flowing.
For Qureshi the lasting questions are about what the company becomes without the Pakistani warehouses it once ran. The pivot towards a marketplace of sellers in other countries is a different business from the one he launched. Pakistan's startup ecosystem will be reading what happens next with interest.
