Haball's $52 million round is mostly Meezan Bank financing for its supply chain platform
Haball, the Karachi fintech behind digital supply chain finance for banks, announced $52 million in April 2025: $5 million of equity and $47 million of financing from Meezan Bank. Its model leans on banks' balance sheets, not its own.
Of the $52 million Haball announced in April 2025, only $5 million was equity. Haball is a Karachi fintech that sells digital supply chain finance, invoicing and payments tools to banks and large manufacturers, and the other $47 million arrived as financing from Meezan Bank, an Islamic lender. Zayn VC led the equity, with Majlis Advisory SPV, private investors in Saudi Arabia and others alongside. Global Trade Review described the Meezan money as off balance sheet strategic financing, and none of the coverage reviewed published its terms.
That makes this less a conventional venture round than a bank placing a large bet on a channel it helped launch. Meezan was there when the product went live on 18 October 2022, according to its own announcement, alongside a Deputy Governor of the State Bank of Pakistan and a finance director from CCI Pakistan, the Coca Cola bottler. The product is called Wisaaq, and it is the clearest way into the company.
How supply chain finance works on Wisaaq
Meezan's account of the launch is the best description available. Distributors of CCI Pakistan could draw Shariah compliant financing from the bank without collateral, with onboarding, disbursement and payment handled on one digital system shared by the distributor, the bank and the bottler. The large corporate anchors the chain, the distributors are the borrowers, and the bank supplies the money. Haball powers the platform.
In December 2025 the same structure was extended to Dawlance, the home appliance maker. Meezan and Haball announced a Murabaha financing facility, the Islamic cost plus sale structure, that lets Dawlance distributors buy stock directly from the manufacturer. Omer bin Ahsan, Haball's founder and chief executive, said when it was announced that Wisaaq was "built exactly for this kind of environment". The announcement gave no facility size, pricing or distributor count.
Haball also sells digital invoicing and payments tools. The company says it was the first Pakistani fintech licensed by the Federal Board of Revenue for digital invoicing. How it charges for all this is the gap in the public record. Fees and revenue appear in none of the coverage reviewed for this article.
A State Bank deadline for digital supply chain finance
Timing helped. On 10 June 2024 the State Bank of Pakistan told banks to develop and offer a digital supply chain finance solution within six months. Global Trade Review reported that the central bank's chief spokesperson, Noor Ahmed, said lenders could choose any solution, build their own or partner with a fintech. A 2023 Asian Development Bank study estimated that the local market could be worth $9 billion within three to five years.
Bin Ahsan read the circular as validation. He told Global Trade Review in June 2024 that its existence was "the first step" in recognition that supply chain finance is a safe and investable product for banks. By then Wisaaq had four lender partners. By April 2025, he said, eight more banks had signed since the deadline and three were in the pipeline. "The circular did the magic it was intended to do," he told the same publication.
The circular cuts the other way too. If every bank must offer a digital product, each can build one, and the central bank's spokesperson said CashNow and Dukan, alongside Haball, already offered some form of digital supply chain finance. Global Trade Review also reported bin Ahsan saying that international platform providers are interested in the Pakistani market. Haball's edge is that it arrived early, with a bank and a bottler already on the system.
Eight thousand SMEs and two sets of numbers
The company's April 2025 statement said it served nearly 8,000 small and medium sized businesses, plus multinationals, had processed more than $3 billion in payments and had disbursed more than $110 million in financing. Arab News, interviewing bin Ahsan on 18 April, reported disbursements of more than $140 million and up to 70 multinationals. Both sets of figures come from the company, and the later one is higher. Named clients in the Arab News report include Coca Cola, Standard Chartered Bank, Dawlance, Meezan Bank, Colgate Palmolive and National Foods.
The ambition is large against that base. Haball told Arab News it wants about $80 million in strategic financing lines by the end of the fiscal year, and bin Ahsan said that figure could pass $1 billion within five years. He said Haball has not yet tapped even 2 percent of the supply chain financing potential that Asian Development Bank and International Finance Corporation reports describe, and cited fewer than 5 percent of Pakistani SMEs having access to commercial bank financing. His pitch on speed is the sharpest line in the interview.
“Our disbursement times are three seconds, not three days”
Haball's Saudi Arabia expansion is the test of an export
The new money is meant to help carry the model to the Gulf. Bin Ahsan told Arab News Haball intended to "set up a beachhead operation in Saudi", starting with a pilot involving partner banks, large corporates and wholesale distributors before moving into SME financing and B2B payments. He told Global Trade Review that Haball had not decided whether to seek its own licence or partner with a regulated entity, and that SME and supply chain financing there are "very nascent". Arab News reported that Iraq, Turkiye and Egypt were among the larger economies Haball was eyeing after Saudi Arabia.
Whether the beachhead was built is not clear from public sources. A ProPakistani review of 2025 says Haball extended its SME lending platform into Saudi Arabia, but it names no partner and no licence, and no other coverage reviewed confirms a Saudi launch. The same April 2025 company statement said Haball was on track to become a regulated payment initiation provider with access to Raast, the national instant payment system. No later report found confirms that either.
The risks: one bank and shifting policy
Concentration is the plain risk. Meezan is the launch partner, a named client, a financier and a participant in the biggest round, and the Dawlance and Coca Cola programmes both run through it. Haball has signed other lenders, but the biggest round and the best known programmes still run through one bank. Policy is the other risk. Bin Ahsan told Arab News that frequent policy changes and a volatile macro environment are the hardest part of building in Pakistan.
What happens next depends on whether the lenders that signed after the circular lend in volume, or merely tick a compliance box. The Haball numbers to watch are active banks, the size of the financing lines and whether a Saudi pilot turns into revenue.
Reported from the company's statements and coverage in Global Trade Review, Arab News, EnterpriseAM, Zawya, The Nation, Meezan Bank's announcements and ProPakistani.
