How Neem went from embedded banking to moving money for insurers, couriers and employers
The Karachi fintech won a lending licence, built a salary advance product on lenders' money and now sells payments infrastructure to businesses.
Neem began as plumbing: banking technology that other companies could build into their own apps. By January it counted more than 50 business clients and said its transaction volumes were growing more than 30 percent a month. Its homepage now leads with payments, not banking in a box.
Plumbing for other people's apps
Nadeem Shaikh, Vladimira Briestenska and Naeem Zamindar founded Neem in Karachi. Its pitch was embedded finance: let a company that is not a bank offer wallets, payments, savings, insurance and loans inside its own product, through Neem's technology and licensed partners. It sized the market at 3.3 million unbanked or underbanked small businesses and more than 200 million consumers.
In September 2022 it announced a $2.5 million seed round. Investors included SparkLabs Fintech, Arif Habib Limited, Cordoba Logistics and Ventures, and partners at Outrun Ventures. Founder Nadeem Shaikh said Neem aims to give customers financial solutions when and where they need them. It offered two products then: a banking as a service platform for partners, and a lending platform for loans to consumers and small businesses.
It lined up infrastructure the same autumn. It signed with JS Bank to use the bank's open banking platform, and in October it became the first Pakistani fintech enabled by BPC, running its embedded finance systems on the payments processor's SmartVista platform.
A lending licence
In December 2022 the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan granted Neem a non banking finance company licence, which it planned to use for embedded lending to segments such as small businesses. It formed a joint venture with Kuunda Holdings, a credit analytics and loan management provider, to finance neighbourhood kiryana stores, and planned to embed lending in the apps of OneLoad, DigiKhata and Udhaar Book. Kuunda Pakistan's chief executive, Jalal ul Haq, said the licence, together with Kuunda's scoring and loan management platform, would support growth financing for retailers, micro merchants and agents. Zamindar described lending as one of the key pillars of Neem's aim to bring financial wellness to underserved communities.
“Our initial focus is on the MSME sector, airtime lending, and smartphone financing as principal use cases.”
Neem still describes itself as a fully licensed non banking finance company, and says its banking services run through branchless banking partnerships with Pakistani banks. But its homepage lists payments tools first: a ledger for balances and settlement, collections across cards, bank accounts, wallets and QR codes, and payouts to vendors, employees and customers.
Salary before payday
The first product to find a clear market was earned wage access. In October 2024 Neem launched Neem Paymenow, a Shariah compliant service built with South Africa's Paymenow, aimed at workers in retail, healthcare, security, manufacturing and logistics. Workers can draw only wages they have already earned, up to 40 percent of salary. Employers pay nothing and connect it to payroll through an API or a simple Excel file, and Neem funds the advances itself, so no employer capital is tied up. Employees pay a nominal service fee, not interest. New users start on a low tier and move up by finishing short lessons on saving, budgeting and fraud. The product runs in Roman Urdu and English, and Neem said it was scaling first in retail, logistics, healthcare and manufacturing.
DNI Group, which made a strategic investment in Neem in August 2023, extended a $4 million credit facility in November 2024 to fund the advances. In July 2025 HBL committed a facility of up to $4 million as well, with Rs100 million as the first release.
“HBL's backing validates our belief that financial wellness isn't a luxury, it's a necessity.”
Payments and insurance
In 2025 Neem widened the payments side. It released a no code Shopify plugin in March that lets ecommerce businesses accept online payments, and a Payment Button in April with several payment methods and fast onboarding. In May it announced a partnership with EFU Life, which uses the Payment Button to collect premiums by card, wallet or bank transfer and match each payment to a policy number automatically, which cuts manual errors and reconciliation delays. The partnership also gave EFU Life a white label wallet and put its Islamic insurance products on Paymenow, so that employees can buy cover where they receive their pay. Insurance penetration in Pakistan is under 1 percent of GDP, the gap the partnership is aimed at.
Customer stories on Neem's website include Leopards Courier Services, where Neem built ledgers for merchants, the fashion marketplace LAAM, and DigiKhata, for payouts to small retailers. Other partners named in 2025 include Sehat Kahani, TCS, Edkasa and Bechlo.pk.
Fresh money and a sandbox
In January 2026 Neem announced a pre Series A round and did not disclose the amount. Epic Angels, DNI Group, Hi2 Global and AKD joined, and existing investors SparkLabs, Outrun Ventures, Arif Habib and MyAsiaVC took part, along with strategic angels from Stripe, PayNet and Aspire. Neem said the money would go to infrastructure, cybersecurity and data protection, enterprise partnerships and faster onboarding in logistics, insurance, healthcare, ecommerce and agriculture.
Epic Angels' managing partner, Maaike Doyer, said global players such as Stripe and Adyen together hold less than 10 percent of the global payments market, which she read as room for local platforms. Neem's own account of the opportunity is that Pakistan has more than 250 million people, yet over 70 percent of transactions still go through traditional channels. Its pitch to enterprises is a single payments layer, covering collections, disbursements and branded wallets and ledgers through one API. It plans to target large enterprises first and is exploring cross border remittances as a later step.
A regulatory step ran in parallel. On 6 January 2026 the State Bank of Pakistan named Neem, listed as Neem Exponential Financial Services Private Limited, among six applicants shortlisted for the first cohort of its regulatory sandbox, with Neem testing open banking. After testing from January to June, four of the six completed it, Neem among them. Completing the cohort is not final approval: the participants still need State Bank authorisation before they offer the products to the public, and until then Neem's open banking work stays in testing.
