Linkstar gave Pakistan's freelancers a free website, then bought a Dubai jobs board
Three childhood friends from Karachi raised SOSV money on a subscription pitch, claimed 50,000 users and acquired Oliv. By 2025 the original platform appears to have closed.
Linkstar began with a number its founders did not like. Freelancers, they argued, could lose up to half their earnings in commissions to marketplaces and agencies. Their own marketplace, Savvy, launched in 2021, had taught Aizaz Nayyer, Adeel Abid and Ali Raza that most freelance work was found elsewhere anyway, through Instagram, WhatsApp and referrals. ProPakistani later put the figure at more than 80 per cent.
So in January 2022 they launched something closer to a website builder than a marketplace. A freelancer or influencer signed up and got an instant landing page. Paying a subscription added a digital store, international payment integration, invoicing and social media feeds. Linkstar took no commission. Nayyer, the chief executive, called it Shopify for freelancers with the added bonus of discovery.
Finding the money
The pitch found investors quickly. In July 2022, six months after launch, CairoScene reported a pre seed round from SOSV, the American venture firm, with Sarmayacar of Pakistan and K3 Diversity Ventures, at a valuation of 5 million dollars. The company said it had 15,000 users. The amount raised was not disclosed, and the Forbes profile published two years later still described it as undisclosed.
The money was modest by any measure. CB Insights records a further convertible note of 30,000 dollars from Orbit Ventures and SOSV in July 2023 and puts Linkstar's total funding at about 210,000 dollars across three rounds. Sarmayacar listed the deal under its angel cheques programme. Linkstar was never a large venture backed company; it was a small one with well known names on its cap table.
Finding the customers
Growth, by the company's own account, came on two fronts. By September 2023 Linkstar told ProPakistani its talent pool exceeded 50,000 freelancers and that it was placing them with businesses in more than 15 countries, building remote teams with a project management tool and, for larger clients, an account manager. It ran masterclasses every two weeks and offered an e wallet for cross border payments. None of these figures has been independently verified, and the company published no revenue.
The Oliv deal and the Forbes list
The biggest move came in 2023, when the founders acquired Oliv, a Dubai career marketplace that connects employers with students and graduates for internships and entry level jobs, according to Forbes. Oliv was older and better funded than its buyer: it had started as InternsME, rebranded in 2018 and raised a 2 million dollar Series A in 2019. Terms of the acquisition were never published, and no business outlet in Pakistan or the Gulf reported the deal at the time. Nayyer had told ProPakistani in September 2023 that big news on youth unemployment in the MENAP region was coming.
In May 2024 Forbes placed all three cofounders on its 30 Under 30 Asia list in the consumer technology category. Geo News counted seven Pakistanis on the list that year. The Forbes profile summarises the business as it stood: free portfolio websites, paid upgrades, online courses and the Oliv acquisition.
What remains
After that the trail goes quiet. No funding, product or expansion news about Linkstar has appeared in 2025 or 2026. The data service PitchBook marked the company out of business in an entry dated April 2025. When this magazine checked in October 2026, linkst.ar was returning a server error, while oliv.com was live and still advertising internships and graduate jobs in the UAE.
The likeliest reading is that the Karachi product has been wound down and the founders' attention has moved to Dubai. The founders have not said so publicly, and until they do, Linkstar's story ends the way many small Pakistani startups' stories do: not with an announcement, but with a website that stops answering.
