LAHORE: Airlift, a Lahore-based on-line purchasing supply service, has raised $85 million in Sequence B financing, the biggest single non-public funding spherical in Pakistan’s historical past.
The financing is about twice the scale of the biggest non-public firm IPO within the nation’s historical past and the very best within the MENA (Center East & North Africa) area.
Airlift Applied sciences Co-founder and CEO Usman Gul mentioned the financing will add 5 per cent to the nation’s overseas direct funding (FDI) for the fiscal 12 months 2022. Sequence B financing is the second spherical of funding for an organization that has met sure milestones and is previous the preliminary startup stage.
The financing is co-led by Josh Buckley of Buckley Ventures and Harry Stebbings of 20VC. Main individuals embrace Y Combinator ex-president Sam Altman, Biz Stone (co-founder at Twitter/Medium), Jeffrey Katzenberg (ex-CEO Disney), Taavet Hinrikus (Founder/CEO at TransferWise), and Seve Pagliuca (Co-Chairman Bain Capital).
“A year ago, Airlift halted operations on the transit service and diversified into last-mile grocery delivery. Today, our team closed $85m in Series B financing to scale our delivery platform across continents. With this financing, we as Pakistanis must return to where we started from fighting against the odds and staying true to our core values of hustle, teamwork, resourcefulness, and bias to action. If this is the journey of a thousand miles, we have taken only the first step,” Mr Gul mentioned.
Printed in Daybreak, August 19th, 2021
