Metric gives its finance app away and sells an accountant for AED 380 a month
The Pakistani founded startup says 200,000 business owners use its AI assistant, Max. Its own pricing page shows how few would have to pay, and its $4.2 billion transaction figure has not moved since 2025.
Metric says 200,000 business owners use its finance app, and its own pricing page shows how few of them would need to pay for the company to cover a small team. The startup, founded by Pakistani operators with offices in Abu Dhabi, Rawalpindi, Singapore and Riyadh, gives its dashboard away and sells a human accountant for AED 380 a month. Its user count has grown by more than half since April 2025. The figure it gives for transactions has not changed.
From venture funds to bookkeeping
Meenah Tariq and Omar Parvez Khan were partners at venture funds before they became operators, according to Dawn's report of their first round. They had worked with startups across Pakistan for about a decade and said they had trained more than 1,000 small businesses. Dr Habiba, the third cofounder and chief technology officer, holds a doctorate in machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Metric launched in August 2021 as a digital accounting app, and on 17 March 2022 it announced an oversubscribed pre seed round of $900,000 led by i2i Ventures, with Ratio Ventures, Deosai Ventures, Kinnow Capital, Outliers Venture Capital and Augmentor Capital taking part. The founders said Metric had recorded $20 million in annualised transactions within five months of a closed alpha. They sized the market at more than 30 million small businesses and startups in the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan, which together contribute about $2 trillion to regional output.
“Traditional accounting is a cost centre. Modern accounting is a profit centre.”
Max and the seed round
In April 2025 Metric announced a seven figure seed round from Sanabil 500 Global, Hub71, i2i Ventures, Plus VC, Epic Angels and Accelerate Prosperity, and unveiled Max, which it calls the world's first Chief Financial AI. Max is a conversational assistant that answers questions about cash flow, runway, hiring capacity and forecasts in plain language, in English and Arabic. In September the round was put at $1.3 million, led by the Qatari fund Atypical Ventures. Its managing partner, Alina Truhina, said Metric was "solving one of the most urgent challenges for SMEs".
The product sits on top of the books rather than replacing them. The company's homepage says Metric syncs with QuickBooks, Zoho and Xero, and its pricing page adds Qoyod, a Saudi accounting package, and bank connections. The design is sensible: a small business that already pays for bookkeeping software will not move its ledger for an assistant, but it may connect the ledger to one.
Disclosed funding is therefore about $2.2 million, made up of $900,000 in 2022 and $1.3 million in 2025.
What the numbers say
The homepage claims 200,000 business owners and "a total of $4.2 B" processed in transactions, and the About page adds 220,000 downloads. The April 2025 coverage said Max served more than 130,000 businesses in 190 countries, and the $4.2 billion was already quoted that year as the proprietary transactional data behind Max. Over the period the user claim rose by about 54 percent, from 130,000 to 200,000, while a total that is described as cumulative stayed where it was. Spread over the users, $4.2 billion is about $32,300 a business at the older count and $21,000 at the newer one. The site gives no date for the figure.
The wording matters too. Nothing on the pricing page describes payments, only dashboards, invoices and reports, so the figure is best read as the value of transactions recorded in customers' books, not money that Metric moved. It measures record keeping, not revenue.
Revenue is where the public record is thinnest. The pricing page lists a free plan at AED 0 and a paid plan, headed "Get Expert Help", at AED 380 a month. The dirham is fixed at 3.6725 to the US dollar, so AED 380 is about $103 a month, or AED 4,560 and about $1,240 a year. The paid plan includes setup of the customer's business on QuickBooks Online, accountant support, custom monthly reports, and year end income statement, cash flow statement, balance sheet and aging reports. VAT filing and recording for businesses with more than 500 transactions is listed as an add on, with no price and a link to contact sales.
A simple scenario shows what the plan needs. If one percent of 200,000 owners paid for the plan, that is 2,000 subscribers paying AED 4,560 a year, or AED 9.12 million, about $2.5 million. The scenario is the magazine's illustration, not a company figure. It also shows where the pressure sits: every subscriber is promised accountant time and a full set of year end statements, so the cost of serving the 2,000 grows with the 2,000, while the free tier costs money to run with no revenue against it.
Set against the team, the same scenario gives about $92,000 of subscription revenue for each of the 27 people the About page names ($2.48 million divided by 27). That is before the cost of the accountants who serve the subscribers, and it assumes a one percent conversion that the company has not reported. Each additional percentage point of conversion would be worth about $2.5 million a year, which is why the paid share matters more to the business than the 200,000 headline.
The homepage also claims that businesses "save 10x on accounting costs". Set against the paid plan, that would mean customers were paying about AED 3,800 a month before, though the site does not say what the saving is measured against.
Who does the work
The About page lists four offices: WeWork at Hub71 on Al Maryah Island in Abu Dhabi, Hub Commercial in Bahria Town, Rawalpindi, Tanjong Pagar Road in Singapore, and Riyadh. It names 27 people. Eight are engineers or testers, two are designers, two are product leads, three hold the title manager of external execution, two are accounts associates and one is in sales and success. The page does not give locations for individuals.
The mix is what separates Metric from a pure software company. A model that answers questions is cheap to serve. A service that also prepares year end statements and files VAT returns carries a labour cost for every customer, and it is that cost which decides whether AED 380 leaves a margin.
What decides the next stage
The case for Metric rests on three things the company has not shown in public: that Max's answers are reliable enough for owners to act on, that the free base converts into paying accounts, and that the accountant layer can be automated over time without losing the compliance work. The company has not published revenue, the number of paying customers, accuracy tests of Max, or the share of users who connect a live ledger rather than sign up and leave.
The gains from success would be wide: small firms in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Pakistan that cannot afford a full time accountant, and a Pakistani engineering team that builds for Gulf customers. The losses fall on investors if the free tier carries the cost without converting, and on users if an assistant gives a confident wrong answer about tax or cash. The detail still missing is the one the pricing page leaves for the sales team: what VAT filing costs on top of AED 380 a month.
