How Shadiyana turned two engineers' wedding planning headaches into a marketplace that lives on venue commissions

Neelam Shoaib has said the idea for Shadiyana came while she was planning her siblings' weddings. Vendor details were scattered, prices were hard to get, and every booking meant phone calls and visits that a working family had little time for.

She and her cofounder Izzah Zaman were both software engineers from the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at NUST. Neither had worked in weddings. That, Zaman has said, was part of the appeal: they came to the industry as outsiders, from working class families, and wanted to build something instead of taking a safe job.

A listing site on $2,500

Shadiyana launched in early October 2021, after Zaman came home from a master's degree at Carnegie Mellon. She had worked at Teradata and Jazz; Shoaib came from Zong and held a master's in systems engineering from NUST. According to Dawn, the company began with $2,500 from Carnegie Mellon, and early on it was funded by the founders, friends and family.

The first product was an aggregator in Islamabad and Rawalpindi covering makeup artists, venues and photographers, with prices, photographs, videos and reviews from past customers. Couples paid nothing. Vendors paid a subscription to be listed, and the Basic plan was offered at 50 percent off at signup. In December 2021 Shadiyana joined the eleventh cohort of the National Incubation Center, and by April 2022 it reported more than 500 registered vendors and about 60,000 users since launch. The team was a few full time salespeople and a larger group of student interns.

The stated aim was blunt. Planning a wedding took about three months, and Shadiyana wanted to cut that to three minutes. Zaman and Shoaib also said they would go slowly with outside money, because they wanted an investor who offered mentorship as well as capital.

The early audience was not only local. In 2022 the company reported about 1,300 daily users from around the world, an average session of three minutes, and a sizeable group of overseas Pakistanis, who often plan family weddings from abroad and cannot visit venues in person. Its blog and Instagram also took up subjects such as colourism, dowry and women's rights in marriage, which set it apart from a plain directory.

Where the money comes from

The business has since changed shape. In 2022 the founders described a model built on vendor subscriptions. Today, Zaman told Dawn in May, commissions make up roughly 80 percent of revenue. Marriage halls are the main earner. Photographers pay about 10 percent of a booking, and venues between 2 and 10 percent depending on the size of the deal. The rest comes from subscriptions and marketing add ons that vendors buy.

Before the latest round of inflation, Dawn reported, the average booking was about Rs600,000, in a range from Rs20,000 to Rs4.4 million.

By May, Dawn reported, Shadiyana had helped organise more than 30,000 weddings across Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, with more than half a million users and over 600 listed vendors.

The split of who pays has stayed constant even as the model changed. Couples pay nothing to search, compare prices and book. Vendors pay, first through subscriptions in the early days and now mostly through a share of each booking, with marketing add ons on top. Zaman is chief executive and Shoaib chief operating officer.

The company has also built things around the marketplace. By mid 2025 it had three offices and operated in Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore, with an annual expo called Wedding Bazar, awards for vendors, and a mobile planner app with checklists, budget trackers and a vendor directory. It lists venues, photographers and cinematographers, makeup artists, decorators, henna artists, caterers, car hire, bridal designers and invitation designers.

The $800,000 round

In December 2025 Shadiyana announced $800,000 in pre seed funding from Indus Valley Capital. Aatif Awan, the fund's managing partner, said the company was bringing order, transparency and trust to one of Pakistan's largest but most underserved industries.

Zaman has said that she and Shoaib came from modest backgrounds where a steady job was the expected path, and that they chose to build a company anyway.

“But we loved building things and losing ourselves in that process.”

It also launched the Shadiyana Wedding Planner App, where couples can search for vendors, compare prices, book and track tasks in one place. Profit reported that the company was then based in Islamabad and moving into Lahore and Karachi.

The company puts the wedding industry at more than Rs900 billion a year. Most of that money still moves through informal contacts, handshake deals and family networks, which is the fragmentation Shadiyana says it is trying to organise.

A harder year for weddings

Budgets are the pressure in 2026. Zaman told Dawn in May that some venues had raised prices by up to Rs500 per head and others would not commit to winter prices, citing uncertainty over oil and input costs linked to the war in the Middle East. Guest lists that once averaged 400 people have shrunk to about 150. Austerity rules, including a 10pm cutoff and a crackdown on the one dish policy, have closed some halls in Islamabad.

Shadiyana has not said how many weddings it has handled in 2026 or how its commission income has moved.

Zaman told Dawn that weddings in Pakistan cannot simply be copied from the West, which is why the company built around local vendors and families rather than an imported template.

The plan for the money

The plan for the new money, as announced, was to add vendors across more cities, launch more technology driven planning tools and grow the team, and to reach more urban and semi urban families. Shadiyana has not disclosed revenue and says it will share performance figures in future updates.