How PostEx turned cash on delivery into a lending business
The Lahore startup began as a courier for online sellers and became their lender, paying them upfront and collecting the cash itself.
Pakistani shoppers still pay cash when the parcel arrives, and that habit built one of the country's more durable startups. PostEx, a Lahore company founded in 2020 as a delivery service for online sellers, now doubles as their lender. It pays merchants soon after dispatch, collects the cash from the customer itself, and earns its margin on the gap.
PostEx did not try to convert buyers to cards. It accepted that most of its merchants' customers would pay cash, put its own riders and capital behind that fact, and lent only against deliveries it controlled.
Cash stuck with the courier
Pakistan's ecommerce market is small next to its population. TechCrunch reported in August 2024 that online sales were about 1.5 percent of total retail, and that about 95 percent of transactions were cash on delivery. A courier typically took 10 to 15 days to hand the collected cash back to the seller, counted from dispatch to delivery. For a small shop selling clothes or cosmetics on Instagram, that meant paying suppliers and staff out of money still sitting with a courier.
Muhammad Omer Khan founded PostEx in 2020 to close that gap by pairing instant payment with delivery. By its first funding announcement on 5 October 2021, the company counted four founders: Khan, Saad Mahmood, Babar Razzaq and Adil Naseem. It ran its own delivery fleet alongside a financing platform.
Lending only to merchants it delivers for
The design choice that matters most is that PostEx does not lend to anyone who walks in. Khan said the company extends credit only to merchants who also use its logistics service, so it sees every order, moves every parcel and collects the cash from the buyer directly. The model, he said, lets the company "control the flow of the funds".
Khan said non performing loans had stayed below 0.03 percent since the company began. The delivery data is the credit file: a merchant with a steady record of dispatched and delivered orders is a known quantity, and repayment comes out of cash that PostEx itself collects.
Because credit goes only to existing logistics customers, Khan said, there is "no cost of acquisition".
About 15,000 merchants were active on the platform. More than 80 percent had signed up for the upfront payment bundled with logistics, and the rest used logistics only.
Raising the money to lend
Lending needs capital, and capital controls made it hard to raise significant debt from traditional lenders, Khan said. In October 2021 PostEx announced a $1.5 million seed round led by MSA Capital, with Shorooq Partners, Zayn Capital, VentureSouq, PNO Ventures, 92Ventures and Arbisoft chief executive Yasser Bashir taking part. The team numbered more than 150 at that point.
For MSA Capital, the bet was a familiar one.
“PostEx's integrated instant payments with logistics is a model we have backed globally”
As merchants built a record of repaying on time, PostEx began working with conventional banks, which now fund some merchant loans from their own balance sheets. The company also became a regulated non bank financial institution in Pakistan and added a growth capital product for sellers.
Buying reach with Call Courier
In August 2022 PostEx acquired Call Courier, an established Pakistani delivery company. The deal took it from three main markets to more than 650 cities, and brought in smaller businesses and larger enterprise customers alongside the fast growing online brands it had started with.
The acquisition also turned the books. PostEx became profitable in November 2023, a little over a year later, Khan said. The company went on to report annual recurring revenue above $21 million, more than four million transactions a month and growth of 10 to 15 percent month on month. It expected to pass $25 million in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2024. These are company figures.
The workforce reflects the physical side of the business. Khan said headcount stood at 6,500 people across 600 cities and would rise to 9,000 by the end of 2024, with more investment going to the cities where he expected the fastest growth.
A 2024 round for the Gulf
A $7.3 million pre Series A round, reported on 20 August 2024, was led by Conjunction Capital, a technology focused investor based in Dubai. Dash Ventures and Sanabil500 joined as new investors, and VSQ, FJ Labs and Zayn VC, already on the register, followed on. The company had raised $8.6 million before that, from investors including Global Founder Capital, MSA Capital and Shorooq Partners.
Khan framed the Gulf move as a bet on spotting gaps in other markets. Saudi Arabia was the first target. PostEx said it had started a pilot with a handful of small and medium merchants and one or two large ones, working with local financing partners while it applied for a financing licence from the Saudi Central Bank. It was reportedly also in talks to raise a further $15 million to scale in the Kingdom.
The company already held a financing licence in the United Arab Emirates and planned to launch there after Saudi Arabia.
