Tazah raised $6.5 million for a Lahore fresh produce marketplace, then moved into Gulf ecommerce

Before Tazah, merchants in Lahore who sold vegetables had to get up before dawn to buy in bulk at the day's price and arrange their own transport, AFP reported. In 2021 Tazah promised that an app would do the buying for them. Four months in, AFP said in January 2022, it was delivering about 100 tonnes of produce a day to merchants in Lahore and Karachi.

Tazah Technologies was a B2B fresh produce marketplace founded by two former Careem executives, Abrar Bajwa and Mohsin Zaka. It bought from farmers, sorted and graded the produce and delivered it to small retailers. It raised $6.5 million within months of launching, more than any other Pakistani agritech on Tracxn's count. By March 2025 Profit was describing its third pivot, away from farm produce and towards cross border ecommerce. Whether the Lahore produce marketplace still operates is unclear. Profit's feature has a section headed "Tazah bites the dust", but its text is behind a paywall.

Tazah's pitch: a managed fresh produce marketplace

Bajwa and Zaka met at Careem, and both, TechCrunch reported, grew up in farming communities in central Punjab. MENAbytes reported that Bajwa had also held a leadership role at Swvl. Their diagnosis was familiar and specific. Fragmented supply chains pushed up prices and caused waste, and the founders estimated that 30 to 40 per cent of produce was lost along the way. Farmers who borrowed from loan sharks, they said, paid interest above 60 per cent.

Tazah's answer was a managed marketplace. It screened produce for quality, removed the rotten items and sorted the rest, working with third party warehouse and trucking providers rather than owning its own facilities. Zaka told TechCrunch that Tazah was not just a box moving operation, because one sack of potatoes can hold several rotten ones.

Two months after launching in Lahore, TechCrunch reported in October 2021, about 300 small and medium sellers were buying through the platform, with monthly retention above 80 per cent and most customers ordering around four times a week. Those are the company's numbers. The first products were ginger, garlic, tomatoes, potatoes and onions.

Tazah's $6.5 million, the biggest agritech funding on Tracxn's count

The money arrived fast. In October 2021 Tazah announced a $2 million pre seed round co led by Global Founders Capital and Zayn Capital, with Ratio Ventures, Walled City Co, i2i Ventures and senior Careem and Swvl executives among the participants. On 22 December it added $4.5 million, co led by Fatima Gobi Ventures and Vibe Capital, with Shorooq Partners, Nuwa Capital and several angels. Dawn reported that the company claimed an annualised gross merchandise value of $7 million after a little over four months, with Karachi already open.

Investors were bullish. Vibe Capital's Ankur Nagpal was quoted by We Talk Startups in April 2022:

“The company is growing really fast and on track to hit eight figures in annualized GMV in the next couple of months”

The plan was a financing arm. Dawn reported that the December money was meant partly for working capital loans to produce sellers and for shortening the time between harvest and sale. AFP added in January 2022 that a $20 million fundraising was under way and that Islamabad was next. We found no record of a larger round since. Tracxn's agritech listing, last updated on 2 October 2026, still shows $6.5 million as Tazah's total, which makes it the top funded company in a sector where Tracxn counts $12.5 million raised across 24 funded companies, so Tazah alone accounts for roughly half. The same page cites $11.8 million elsewhere, so treat the share as approximate.

Tazah's pivots: from farm produce to Zambeel in the Gulf

Profit's March 2025 piece, by Nisma Riaz and Taimoor Hassan, carried the subtitle that Tazah's $6.5 million pre seed was fuelling a strategic third pivot from agritech to cross border ecommerce. Only the opening of that article was available to us, so the reasons for each change of direction are not something we can report.

A summary published by Techlist on 11 March 2025 gives the sequence. First came the B2B produce marketplace. Then came Tazah Global, a platform meant to connect international buyers with Pakistani produce. Then came Zambeel, which offers dropshipping, warehousing and fulfilment to sellers in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Zambeel's own About page says it is a subsidiary of Tazah Technologies Pte Ltd and gives a Singapore address. Its website now advertises Gulf and US dropshipping, a warehousing and last mile service called Zambeel 3PL and a sourcing and customs service called Zambeel 360. It lists nine countries it covers, Pakistan among them, advertises weekly payments to sellers and shows an 80 per cent cash on delivery ratio.

The company has not published order volumes, seller numbers or revenue that we could find, and nothing we could read says whether Zambeel has raised money separately. Tazah's original website, tazahtech.com, which TechCrunch linked in 2021, would not load when we tried, and tazah.com shows only a launching soon sign up page that does not mention Pakistan or Zambeel. We could not confirm that the Lahore produce marketplace still operates.

What the detour says about Pakistani agritech

The public record we could read does not settle whether this was a failure. Tazah has not, in anything we found, said it shut its produce business, and no source we could read explains why the company left it. What the record shows is a company that raised on one thesis and now trades on another.

It is worth separating the idea from the execution. A managed marketplace buys, grades, stores and delivers perishable goods to many small buyers, which means carrying inventory and wastage risk and chasing payments from vendors who buy several times a week. The financing product Tazah's investors talked about would have added credit risk on top.

For the investors who wrote $6.5 million of cheques in 2021, the interesting question is what the new business is worth, not whether the old one was right. Zambeel is ecommerce infrastructure for sellers in the Gulf. It has little to do with farmers in Punjab, where the founders said they grew up.

Reported from coverage in TechCrunch, Dawn (including its AFP report), MENAbytes, We Talk Startups, Profit and Techlist, Zambeel's own pages and Tracxn's agritech listing.