In December 2021 Hasib Malik became the first Pakistani founder to take money from Tiger Global. The New York fund led an $11 million pre Series A into CreditBook alongside London's Firstminute Capital, and Profit by Pakistan Today reported that the round was oversubscribed. TechCrunch noted it was the first Pakistani investment for Tiger Global, and Profit said the same of both funds. For a company that was then 18 months old and did not charge its users anything, it was a remarkable vote of confidence.
Malik is cofounder and chief executive of CreditBook, the Karachi fintech he started in 2020 with his wife Iman Jamall and Hisham Adamjee. It began as a free digital ledger, or khata, that let small shopkeepers replace paper account books and chase payments with SMS and WhatsApp reminders. It has since become a licensed nonbank lender to small businesses.
That arc, from free software to regulated credit, is the one many Pakistani fintechs have tried to follow. What makes Malik's version worth examining is how long he has been explaining it, and how carefully the claims have to be separated from the evidence. This profile does that.
A first idea that failed
Malik came to the problem by a roundabout route. He and Jamall studied together at Esade in Barcelona, where Crunchbase records an MSc in innovation and entrepreneurship for him. They first tried to build a startup around Karachi's public transport, which they dropped after failing to get transport companies on board, according to a December 2021 account in We Talk Startups. The attempt sparked an interest in financial inclusion.
The idea that stuck came from Jamall's work as a service designer at one of Pakistan's largest banks, and from Hisham Adamjee, the third cofounder, who had about 15 years in the sector and pointed to the ledger apps that were working in India and Indonesia. Jamall told TechCrunch that she began research and experiments in late 2019, surveying corner shops and unbanked businesses where informal credit, called udhaar and recorded in a handwritten khaata, was the norm. In other words, the company was built from a failed first attempt, a piece of field research and a model that had already worked elsewhere, rather than from a single flash of inspiration.
The khata goes digital
CreditBook launched in June 2020, in the middle of the pandemic. Pakistan's shopkeepers sold on credit and kept the record in a paper khata. The founders paid for the first version themselves, and We Talk Startups reported that trial and error taught them what users wanted: a simple digital ledger with automatic repayment alerts. The app sent free SMS and WhatsApp reminders to customers who owed money. The company told Dawn in May 2021 that reminders made collection up to three times faster, and that the app was available in six local languages.
That is a company claim, and a convenient one. Still, the logic is plain. A shopkeeper who has to chase every debtor in person loses time and goodwill, and a message from an app is easier to send and easier to receive.
Trust before technology
“Never has anyone been able to successfully digitise the MSMEs. Many have tried to build the trust but most have failed.”
Malik's answer was proximity. In the same interview he said the team was always very close to its customers, and he told Profit in December 2021 that running a remote first organisation had helped it attract good talent. He told We Talk Startups that charging for a utility app would be a mistake and that digitising the sector meant taking shopkeepers through an education process. By December 2021 the company said the app was in use in more than 400 towns and cities and transacting users had grown tenfold in a year, though it declined to give TechCrunch a merchant count.
The refusal to name a merchant count is worth noting. It means the growth figures arrived as percentages and multiples rather than as numbers an outsider could test.
Two rounds in eight months
In May 2021 CreditBook announced a seed round of $1.5 million, co led by BitRate VC and VentureSouq, with Better Tomorrow Ventures, Ratio Ventures, Quiet Capital, Toy Ventures and i2i Ventures taking part and the app reporting over 500,000 users and 450 percent growth in six months. Faisal Aftab of BitRate said he was moved by the team's ability to move fast and ship features regularly. Other accounts of the same money differ: We Talk Startups calls it a pre seed led by Better Tomorrow Ventures, and a Forbes profile updated in April 2021 mentions a smaller pre seed of $175,000.
In December 2021, with Malik announcing it as chief executive, came the $11 million pre Series A. TechCrunch listed Better Tomorrow Ventures, Banana Capital, VentureSouq, Ratio Ventures and i2i Ventures among the other investors, with the angels Sriram Krishnan and Julian Shapiro. CreditBook estimated an unmet financing gap for small businesses of $45 billion. Malik described the aim as a one stop solution for entrepreneurs to improve their financial outcomes.
Forbes had named Malik and Jamall to its 30 Under 30 Asia 2021 list in the social impact category in April of that year, before either round was announced. The money was meant to fund the move into financial services, and in the years since the company has pursued that plan.
From ledger to lender
CreditBook has set up CreditBook Financial Services, a wholly owned subsidiary and non bank finance company licensed by the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan for investment finance services, which covers lending, and for digital lending. Its Tijara module inside the khata app is whitelisted for digital lending, and the company calls it the first nonbank lender to small businesses to receive that approval. The SECP's approved list of lending apps dated July 2026 still carries CreditBook Tijara under business to business financing. The licensing page gives no dates for any of the approvals.
Malik now describes CreditBook as a financial services startup rather than a bookkeeping app. The company says its two licences open the way to embedded finance, lending through other platforms. The licence matters because it separates a lender operating within the regulator's framework from the unlicensed loan apps that have drawn complaints in Pakistan's market.
Playing the long game
Speaking to Rest of World in June 2024, Malik said entrepreneurship and investment in Pakistan had become tied to the country's political and economic conditions, but that the future was bright. He pointed to infrastructure development and to business to business products that earn dollar revenue while paying costs in rupees. His advice to investors in the same interview was to back the founder and not just the business model.
“Become a category leader, play the long game.”
The company's own numbers are more modest than its early hype. A 2025 year in review posted on CreditBook's LinkedIn page claimed nine financial products, an eightfold rise in transaction volume and more than 500,000 businesses impacted. Tracxn put headcount at 27 in September 2026. CreditBook has not announced new venture funding since 2021, and the magazine has not been able to verify the company's lending figures independently.
What the next phase will test
A lender lives or dies on repayment, and that is the figure outsiders cannot yet see. Malik's thesis is that years of ledger data, showing who buys from whom and who pays on time, give CreditBook an underwriting advantage over banks that rarely lend to small shops. Whether that holds through an economic cycle, with no fresh venture money since 2021, is the real test of the long game he describes.
