Aizaz Nayyer had a simple pitch when his company announced its first outside money in July 2022. Freelancers and influencers in Pakistan were selling their services through social media and personal networks rather than on marketplaces, and nobody had built them a shopfront. Linkstar, the Karachi startup he led as chief executive, would be that shopfront.
Nayyer is the public face of three cofounders, who also include Adeel Abid and Ali Raza, and the person who spoke for the company in print. He is a graduate of the Lahore University of Management Sciences, known as LUMS, and held a regional marketing role at Daraz, the Alibaba owned ecommerce group, before turning to startups. He later took the company in a direction its first customers might not have predicted, towards a careers portal in Dubai.
The story matters for what it shows about building for informal workers. Linkstar was a plausible idea, attracted respected investors and won Forbes recognition. It also appears to have closed. The accurate account, as this profile sets out, includes both the ambition and the quiet ending.
Three friends and a first marketplace
Linkstar was not the trio's first attempt. Sarmayacar, the Lahore venture fund that backed them, describes Nayyer, Abid and Ali Raza as childhood friends. Abid previously worked in the United Kingdom at Banco Santander, and Raza had wide experience in digital agencies, managing major local and international brands, according to the same page.
In 2021 the three started Savvy, a freelance marketplace. Sarmayacar says Savvy reached six figure dollar revenues. Then the founders drew a different lesson from it. ProPakistani reported in September 2023 that they had found more than 80 percent of freelance work happened outside marketplaces altogether, through social media, referrals and personal networks. A marketplace takes a commission when work flows through it, and most work did not. Sarmayacar put the cost to the freelancer bluntly: freelancers and influencers, it said, lose out on up to 50 percent in commissions to marketplaces and agencies.
A pitch that sounded like Shopify
Linkstar, launched in January 2022, was therefore built as a subscription product for the freelancer rather than a commission business sitting between freelancer and client. When it announced a pre seed round on 22 July 2022, CairoScene reported the investors as SOSV, Sarmayacar and K3 Diversity Ventures, at a reported valuation of 5 million dollars. The amount raised was never disclosed. Forbes later described the round as undisclosed and from SOSV of the United States. Nayyer was named as chief executive and cofounder, and he described the product in terms investors would recognise.
“Think of it as Shopify for Freelancers & Influencers with the added bonus of Discovery.”
The product was a free website for a freelancer, built in minutes, with paid upgrades that added international payments, invoicing and social media integrations. By July 2022 the company claimed 15,000 users. Those were the company's own figures.
Daraz, a DJ booth and a LUMS degree
A week after the funding announcement, on 29 July 2022, Nayyer spoke at a Startup Grind Karachi fireside chat billed with him as chief executive of Linkstar. The biography published for the event describes him as a LUMS alumnus and a former regional marketing lead at Daraz. The same biography lists him as cofounder and resident DJ at BeatWorks, an events company.
Marketing at a marketplace and running events are both jobs about attention: who turns up, why, and what makes them come back. Nayyer has not said how far those experiences shaped Linkstar, and this profile does not claim to know. What the record shows is a founder whose background was in demand generation rather than engineering.
What the platform offered
ProPakistani described the finished product in September 2023. A freelancer got a free portfolio website, which could be upgraded to a digital store through what the article called affordably priced subscriptions, with international payment integration and invoicing. Social media links drove traffic from profiles on LinkedIn and Instagram, with analytics to track it. No specific prices were given.
Around the websites sat a wider service. A project board let freelancers apply for daily business projects, with selection depending on portfolio quality and relevance. Bi weekly masterclasses from industry experts covered subjects from digital marketing to user experience design. An e wallet handled payments inside Pakistan and across borders. For businesses there were remote team creation, a project management tool and an account manager for larger projects. The company called itself a commission free talent platform.
It is a sound observation about how services are sold in Pakistan, where a referral on WhatsApp or a message from a friend of a friend often does the job of a listing. The harder question is whether freelancers will pay a monthly fee for a website when a free profile on a social network already does most of the work. Linkstar's answer was to add the things a social profile cannot do, such as accepting international payments.
From Karachi to a larger mission
By September 2023 Nayyer, writing as chief executive, was telling ProPakistani that Linkstar's talent pool exceeded 50,000 and that it was serving companies in more than 15 countries across five continents. The article added a survey claim that 83 percent of businesses said freelancers had greatly helped their operations. These were again the company's own numbers. He also hinted at something bigger.
“We are committed to a larger mission of tackling the problem of youth unemployment in MENAP, which is close to 30%. Our vision goes beyond just freelancing, and we will soon be announcing some massive news in this regard very soon which will open up even more opportunities for the youth of our region.”
The news turned out to be Oliv, a Dubai career marketplace for students and graduates that the founders acquired in 2023. Forbes described it as a platform that helps companies hire students and graduates for internships, part time work and jobs after graduation. Its profile placed all three men on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list for consumer technology, dated 15 May 2024, and remains the most prominent coverage they have had. The data service Dealroom now lists Nayyer among Oliv's founding team.
What has gone dark
What has happened to Linkstar since is harder to see. Its website, linkst.ar, was returning a server error when checked in October 2026, and the data service PitchBook has marked the company as out of business since April 2025. Oliv's site remains online.
Nayyer has not announced a closure, and no Pakistani outlet has reported one. The honest summary is that the shopfront he built for freelancers appears to have closed, while the careers portal he bought lives on. This profile has not been able to reach him to confirm that, and it treats the closure as a strong inference rather than an established fact.
What is left to learn from it
If Linkstar has closed, it will not be the first Pakistani consumer startup to do so, and the lessons are modest ones. The founders read their own data honestly, abandoned a marketplace that earned revenue because they saw a bigger pattern, and moved to a market where graduates and employers could be matched more directly. Those are the decisions of a company paying attention to evidence.
The next chapter for Nayyer is the Dubai portal and the mission he described in 2023: youth unemployment across the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan. A careers marketplace is a different business from a freelancer toolkit, with employers as the paying side and students as the supply. Whether it succeeds will be judged by placements rather than by announcements.
