Savyour paid out Rs400 million in cashback, then closed with positive margins

Savyour told the press in November 2021 that it had grown 52 percent a month since launch and paid out more than Rs100 million in cashback. When it announced its closure in February 2025, it put the lifetime payout at more than Rs400 million to 4 million customers. Its cofounder said the company had reached positive margins. Put the two sets of totals side by side and they describe a business that was real, and one whose monthly payout moved much less than the launch growth rate implied.

Savyour launched in August 2020. Umair Gadit was chief executive and Saad Gadit was the cofounder. The company called itself the first cashback app in Pakistan and the first pay per sale affiliate network. A shopper opened the app, picked a retailer such as Daraz, foodpanda, Bata or Pizza Hut, and bought through Savyour. The brand paid Savyour a commission on the sale, and Savyour passed part of it back to the shopper as cashback in a wallet that could be withdrawn to a bank account or a mobile wallet.

How the money moved

The commission is the whole business. Brands paid only for completed sales, so Savyour carried no advertising risk for them. In return it earned the gap between the commission it received and the cashback it paid out. It never disclosed the commission rates, the share it kept, or its revenue. Cashback could reach 20 percent of the purchase on some offers. Cashback cannot exceed the commission unless the company tops it up from its own pocket, so on its richest offers either the brand was paying Savyour more than a fifth of the basket, or Savyour was spending its own margin to attract users.

Savyour called itself a fintech because the rewards ran through its own systems and could be withdrawn to a bank account or wallet. That has a cost. Every rupee of cashback sitting in a wallet is a liability owed to a customer, and the company had to pay it out on request. The wind down in 2025 turned on that: users were told to withdraw any remaining balance by 20 March 2025, after which the app and website would go offline.

Reading the first year

In November 2021 Savyour raised a $3.3 million seed round, co led by Global Founders Capital and Zayn Capital. Fatima Gobi Ventures, Rally Cap Ventures, +92 Ventures and Suya Ventures took part, as did two angels. The founders had bootstrapped the company until then, and the seed was its first venture round. It reported more than 200,000 orders in under a year, over 250 partner brands, users in 58 cities and over Rs100 million paid out in cashback.

Divide the first year's numbers and a pattern appears. Rs100 million of cashback over 200,000 orders is Rs500 of cashback per order. Because cashback was at most 20 percent of the purchase, the average order was worth at least Rs2,500 (Rs500 divided by 0.20), and total sales through the app were at least Rs500 million (Rs100 million divided by 0.20). At about Rs175 to the dollar in late 2021, that is roughly $2.9 million of retail sales as a floor. If the typical reward was 5 percent, the sales were four times that, Rs2 billion.

The 52 percent figure needs the same treatment. Growth of 52 percent a month compounded over the 14 months between August 2020 and October 2021 multiplies a starting figure by about 350. That describes a first month with almost no orders, which is normal for a new app, and says little about the scale of the business. The company did not say which measure grew at that rate.

What the later totals show

The closure figures allow a second calculation. In February 2025 Savyour said it had distributed more than Rs400 million in cashback to 4 million customers. Rs400 million over 4 million customers is Rs100 per customer across the whole life of the company. With Rs500 paid on an average order in the first year, that implies most of those customers earned cashback on one small order or none.

Compare the periods on the same measure, cashback paid. By November 2021, about 15 months in, the total was over Rs100 million, an average of roughly Rs6.7 million a month. By the closure announcement in late February 2025, a further 39 months later, the total was over Rs400 million. The extra Rs300 million works out to roughly Rs7.7 million a month. The average monthly payout after the seed round was therefore only about 15 percent higher than the average before it. These are cumulative totals from public statements, not audited accounts, so the monthly averages are estimates. They suggest that the money, the added brands and the new cities did not lift the volume of cashback flowing through the app by anything like the multiple that the launch growth rate implied.

Cashback is the best available proxy for sales, since it is a fixed share of them. A flat payout means roughly flat sales, and flat sales mean flat commission income, while the cost of a team, wallet operations and customer support does not fall.

Why it closed while profitable

Savyour said the decision to discontinue was taken 12 months before the announcement. The company said the team had been working through a managed wind down over the past year. It did not give a reason. Umair Gadit told the press the company had reached positive margins. Margins are a ratio, and a company can show a positive one on commission income too small to pay for the people running it.

The funding climate was the backdrop. Invest2Innovate data put Pakistani startup funding at $355 million in 2022 and $43 million in 2024, a fall of 88 percent. Savyour raised its seed in 2021, before that fall. Put the other way, the 2024 total was 12 percent of the 2022 total ($43 million divided by $355 million is 0.121), so a follow on round would have been sought from a market with about an eighth of the money available. The sources do not say whether Savyour tried to raise one.

An illustration shows the scale involved. Savyour never published its revenue, so suppose it kept a third of the cashback it paid. Rs400 million of cashback would then imply about Rs133 million of commission income over four and a half years, around Rs30 million a year, which is under $9,000 a month at about Rs280 to the dollar in early 2025. The one third share is the magazine's assumption, not a disclosed figure. It does show why a company with 4 million customers could still be too small to carry a full team.

The stakes differ by group. Users with balances had a fixed window to withdraw, and the company did not say what happens to balances left after 20 March 2025. Partner brands lose a performance channel that cost them nothing until a sale closed. Shoppers lose a cashback layer on Daraz, foodpanda and similar retailers that other apps in the market have to replace.

Savyour told partners it would work through financial closure with each of them directly. Its app and website went offline after 20 March 2025, and the company has published no accounts. The 4 million customer and Rs400 million figures remain the only measures of its size on the record.