Rozee began as a hiring page for a social network, and outlived it

Monis Rahman built Rozee because he needed to hire. In the early 2000s he was running Naseeb Networks, a social network aimed at Muslim communities in the United States and Britain, and he put up an online job portal to recruit staff for it. Other companies asked to post their own vacancies on the same pages. By 2007 the portal was drawing more traffic than the social network. Naseeb faded, and the Lahore company that grew from the portal has spent the years since looking for products to sell beyond the job advertisement.

A portal that outgrew its parent

Rahman reportedly spent $60,000 to start Naseeb, according to a Forbes article cited by Profit. He has described the reasoning in a sentence about cost.

“Naseeb emerged because I knew engineering was cheap in Pakistan.”

The network later drifted into matchmaking and slowed as larger platforms such as Facebook grew. The recruiting portal went the other way. It became Rozee, and Wamda reported in 2015 that Naseeb Networks had been the first Pakistani online company to raise venture capital, in 2008.

Venture money and a Saudi purchase

In May 2015 Naseeb Networks announced a $6.5 million Series C round led by Vostok Nafta and Piton Capital, which brought the total raised since 2005 to about $8.5 million. Earlier backers included Draper Fisher Jurvetson, ePlanet Capital, Reid Hoffman and MENA Venture Investments.

The company said at the time that it served more than 10,000 companies and 5 million job seekers and processed about 1.5 million applications a month. Revenue from its job classifieds had grown about 115 times since 2008. It had bought Mihnati.com, a Saudi jobs site, in 2013, and said the site's profitability and visits had risen more than 500 percent since. Rahman said the plan was to grow in existing markets first, then pursue what he called "controlled expansion within the Middle East."

A new chief executive

In December 2021 Rahman stepped down as chief executive after more than a decade and stayed on as chairman, saying Rozee needed "dedicated focused leadership." Shahid Hosain Kazi took over. He had about 27 years in digital technology and financial services and had been chief operating officer of FINCA Microfinance Bank, where he oversaw the launch of SimSim, a smartphone wallet built with Finja.

Rozee said at the time that it was profitable, growing 40 percent a year and had raised $9.5 million in venture capital across several rounds. It said it served about 10 million professionals and 65,000 hiring managers. Kazi's plan was to turn the company into a career and financial wellness platform, with savings accounts, salary advances and insurance to follow. Rozee also ran Rozgar, a social network for blue collar workers that it said had 60,000 self registered users who used it to find jobs.

Finance and freelancing

Finance had already drawn Rahman outside Rozee. Finja began as an attempt to build Pakistan's first mobile wallet, and he helped launch it with FINCA, which had bought Kashf Microfinance Bank in 2013 and invested more than Rs820 million in it. SimSim, launched in 2017 as a partnership between Finja and FINCA's banking licence, was the result. Profit reported that Rahman raised about $1 million for it.

During Covid he started Dukan, a commerce, payments and lending platform for micro, small and medium businesses. An August 2021 press release claimed 100,000 small businesses had built stores on it, and by October the claim was 200,000. Dukan then laid off about a quarter of its staff in the 2021 funding slowdown, and it now works with easypaisa on easypaisa Karobar, which targets two million retail merchants with in app payments and loans.

In August 2023 Rozee launched Azadee, a freelancing platform for Pakistani professionals, alongside Rizq, a financial app that lets freelancers and professionals save, invest in mutual funds, join informal savings committees and reach loans through partner institutions. Employers could post short projects, such as building a mobile app or designing a logo, instead of hiring full time. Rozee said it would ensure payment when projects end and draw up formal agreements between the parties.

The company gave its own hiring data as the reason. Rozee said job postings on its platform had fallen 30 percent over the previous 16 months, a period of high inflation and layoffs. Rahman said he believed Azadee could be "a shot in the arm to boost a slowing economy constrained by cashflows." Kazi, by then chief executive, said the platform gave freelancers and businesses wider opportunities while letting employers expand on lean budgets.

RozeeGPT and the pattern

On 6 December 2024 Rozee unveiled RozeeGPT, an AI recruitment tool. Rozee said it was built on several large language models, including OpenAI's GPT, Google's Gemini, LLAMA and Deepseek, fine tuned on its own job postings and CVs. CVs are ranked and coloured green for the strongest matches, blue for moderate matches and yellow for the rest. Screening tools support Urdu and Punjabi, and an AI recruiter searches the database for suitable candidates, contacts them on WhatsApp and asks them to submit updated CVs. Rahman said the launch meant the company was "not just evolving but disrupting ourselves."

The sequence of products points one way, and this is the magazine's reading rather than Rozee's statement. Each new product sells something to customers Rozee already has. Azadee goes to the employers who post jobs, Rizq to the professionals who search for them and RozeeGPT to the recruiters who screen the replies. A jobs board earns when hiring is strong, and Rozee's own figures showed postings down 30 percent when Azadee launched. Products that raise what each employer or job seeker pays do not depend on more vacancies.

Rozee is private and has not published revenue, profit or the number of hires, freelancing projects or loans handled through the newer products, so how well each one works is unmeasured. Its reach figures are one thing it does publish, and the December 2024 release gave the same 65,000 employers and 10 million professionals it gave in December 2021.