Muhammad Saad was still an undergraduate at the Lahore University of Management Sciences when he decided he would build companies rather than join one. He finished his BS in computer science in 2015 and went straight into his first venture, Treble, a music startup. According to a LUMS alumni feature published on 17 June 2022, Treble was early for its time and did not survive.
“I had decided I wanted to build something of my own while I was still a student at LUMS.”
Saad is now a cofounder of BridgeLinx, a Lahore digital freight marketplace that in September 2021 announced the largest seed round in Pakistan's history. He is one of four founders, and every source that names a chief executive gives that title to Salman Gul. Saad's own role is described in public as cofounder, and his current day to day position is not stated.
His career so far is a compact case study in how a technical founder learns: one failure, one quiet success, and then a company that attracted some of the best known names in venture capital.
A music startup that came too early
Treble was the first test. LUMS says it was launched right after graduation, in the music space, and that it was early for its time. Saad told the university he went through many highs and lows before it failed. The account passes over the detail, and he does not appear to have dwelt on it in public since. He moved on to the next venture.
Both of his early companies were bootstrapped. Saad told LUMS that one of his first difficulties was building and growing a team while earning income on the side, because neither business could yet pay him properly.
A venture builder that made money
The second attempt went better. Saad founded We Over I, a venture builder that works with startups abroad as an extension of their product teams, connecting Pakistani engineers with foreign companies. LUMS describes it as bootstrapped and now profitable, which in Lahore's startup scene of the late 2010s was rarer than a funding round.
The university describes the company only briefly, but the fact that it made money matters. A venture builder lives on relationships and on reliable delivery. Saad's work there, finding engineers and matching them to foreign teams, was a lesson in how a marketplace works from the supply side, and a good preparation for what followed.
Four founders and a pandemic
It was during the Covid 19 lockdowns of 2020 that Saad met the three people who would become his cofounders. The LUMS feature names them only as Salman, Ahsan and Abbas. Coverage of the seed round by MENAbytes in September 2021 fills in the surnames: Salman Gul, Ahsan Tanveer and Abbas Hassan. TechCrunch reported that Gul, who became chief executive, had previously worked at the consultancy KPMG in Canada.
The four settled on freight. Pakistan's road haulage was spread across thousands of owner operators and small fleets, and large manufacturers booked trucks through brokers and phone calls. TechCrunch described the waste in plain terms: a truck that delivers from Islamabad to Lahore is unlikely to find a load for the return trip, a decades old problem that costs everyone in the chain. LUMS puts the road freight industry at more than $50 billion and calls it paper based and slow to adopt technology, which is how Saad described the challenge of modernising it.
BridgeLinx, established in late 2020, built a marketplace that matched shippers with carriers and wrapped the booking in document checks, port handling and tracking. Saad left We Over I to work on it full time, giving up a profitable business for one that had yet to earn anything.
How the marketplace works
MENAbytes reported that customers book vehicles through a mobile app, that scheduling and routing technology pairs each load with a transport partner, and that shippers can follow a shipment live and see its documents. The service covers the whole job from matching to payment. Its customers at the time included textile groups, cement makers, agribusinesses, electronics manufacturers, chemical companies and online marketplaces.
The company said it owned no trucks. Gul told TechCrunch he wanted to add some company owned vehicles so that trucks could run around the clock with drivers working in shifts, and described the long term goal as a hybrid of the asset light model of India's BlackBuck and the fleet owning model of Rivigo.
The largest seed round in the country
Nine months after launch, on 13 September 2021, BridgeLinx announced a $10 million seed round. TechCrunch reported it as the largest seed financing in Pakistan, co led by Harry Stebbings' 20VC, Josh Buckley's Buckley Ventures and Indus Valley Capital. Wavemaker Partners, Quiet Capital, TrueSight Ventures, Soma Capital, Flexport and Magnus Rausing's Untitled took part, along with the founders of the American freight marketplace Convoy and of the Pakistani business to business platform Bazaar.
MENAbytes added that the round was almost twice oversubscribed and that large Pakistani business groups including Maple Leaf Capital had joined. The company said it was the best capitalised freight marketplace in the country and would use the money to widen its product range and move into more industries and routes.
“BridgeLinx has cracked the code for making end to end freight work in a hassle free manner.”
At the time the company said only that thousands of carriers had signed up and thousands of loads moved each week. By the time of the LUMS feature nine months later, it was describing tens of thousands of loads and carriers, and said more than two thirds of Pakistan's top 100 exporters used it. At the seed announcement MENAbytes had quoted the company at more than a fifth, so the two figures, both company claims, imply rapid growth or a looser definition of use.
A Forbes listing and a quieter stretch
The LUMS feature says the company grew to more than 250 people within about a year and a half. Saad was careful to spread the credit around.
“my achievements are not my own, they are my team's”
In May 2022 Forbes placed Saad on its 30 Under 30 Asia list in the industry, manufacturing and energy category, one of four Pakistanis on that year's list, as Geo News reported. He called the recognition quite a humbling experience. His Forbes profile credits him as a cofounder of BridgeLinx.
His advice to students, in the same interview, was to experiment widely without fearing failure, and to work at a fast growing startup before founding one.
Series A and what is not known
Since the seed round the company has said little in public. Its most recent disclosed financing is a Series A led by Indus Valley Capital, which the Singapore law firm Allen and Gledhill confirmed it advised on in May 2024 without giving a figure. CB Insights lists the round as closed on 27 May 2024. Data providers list BridgeLinx as privately held and operating, with roughly 110 to 130 staff, but no announcements from the company itself in 2025 or 2026 could be found.
The headcount figures point to a company that grew fast and then contracted, though the company has not described that in public and this magazine will not assume the reasons. Freight is a hard market for marketplaces. Margins are thin, shippers can go around the platform, and carriers are quick to leave when a better rate appears.
What a third act would need
For Saad the question is what comes next, inside BridgeLinx or elsewhere. He has now founded three companies, and he has shown he can build, raise and share credit. What the public record does not yet show is whether he can lead a business through a harder phase than the one in which it was loved by investors.
It is not an unfair test. Every founder in Pakistan's technology industry who raised capital in 2021 faces it, and the way they respond will shape what the next generation of founders believes is possible.
