How BridgeLinx raised Pakistan's biggest seed round in nine months, and what came after
Four founders, a cement factory's trucking problem and a $10 million cheque co led by 20VC. Five years on, the company is still private, still in Lahore and much quieter.
In the final weeks of 2020, four men in Lahore started a trucking company that owned no trucks. BridgeLinx was built as a marketplace: on one side, large shippers such as cement factories, textile mills and exporters; on the other, the owner operators, transporters and private fleets that actually move goods on Pakistan's roads. The company's software handled the parts that usually went wrong, document validation, port operations, booking and tracking.
The founders were Salman Gul, a former KPMG consultant in Canada who became chief executive, Muhammad Saad, a LUMS computer science graduate on his third startup, Ahsan Tanveer and Abbas Hassan, according to MENAbytes' coverage of the company's seed round in September 2021.
Finding the shippers first
BridgeLinx went after the biggest customers early. By September 2021 the company said more than a fifth of Pakistan's top 100 exporters were actively using the platform, that it had onboarded thousands of carriers, and that it was moving thousands of loads a week across more than 100 lanes, as ProPakistani reported on 14 September 2021. Those were company figures and have not been independently audited.
The model was deliberately asset light, in the mould of India's BlackBuck. Gul told TechCrunch in September 2021 that the company would eventually run a hybrid, adding some trucks of its own alongside the marketplace.
“We will eventually have a hybrid of what BlackBuck and Rivigo offer.”
Ten million dollars, oversubscribed
Nine months after launch, BridgeLinx announced a $10 million seed round. TechCrunch, ProPakistani and Bloomberg all described it as the largest seed financing in Pakistan's history. It was co led by Harry Stebbings' 20VC, Josh Buckley's Buckley Ventures and Karachi based Indus Valley Capital, with Wavemaker Partners, Quiet Capital, TrueSight Ventures, Soma Capital, Flexport, Magnus Rausing's UNTITLED and the founders of Convoy and Bazaar also taking part. MENAbytes reported the round was nearly twice oversubscribed and closed within weeks.
“BridgeLinx has cracked the code for making end to end freight work in a hassle free manner”
The round landed weeks after Bazaar's $30 million Series A, at the peak of foreign venture interest in Pakistan. BridgeLinx said the money would go on new verticals, technology and hiring. By mid 2022 the company had grown past 250 staff, according to a LUMS feature on cofounder Muhammad Saad, who was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list that May.
The quiet years
Pakistan's venture market then turned sharply. Funding fell sharply after 2022 and dozens of startups closed or pivoted, including Airlift. BridgeLinx was not among the casualties, but it also stopped making announcements.
Its one disclosed financing since the seed is a Series A led by Indus Valley Capital, the firm that co led the seed. The Singapore law firm Allen & Gledhill said on 27 May 2024 that it had advised BridgeLinx Logistics Pte. Ltd. on the round, confirming that the group is now held through a Singapore entity. No amount was published, and data providers Tracxn and Dealroom list it as undisclosed.
As of October 2026, Tracxn and PitchBook describe BridgeLinx as a private, operating company with roughly 110 to 128 employees, down from the 250 reported in 2022. Its LinkedIn page still calls it Pakistan's premier digital freight marketplace and its website remains live. Nothing from the company itself about 2025 or 2026 trading, customers or further funding could be found, so the current scale of the business is best treated as unknown.
