Payments finally clear
Payoneer, Wise and merchant-of-record rails let a Lahore team bill a Denver customer in dollars without a US entity on day one.
Pre-seed & seed · Pakistan
01
02
03
Capital for the founders building here.
10xC backs technical founders building from Pakistan. We write the first institutional cheque into software that already has a user who cares, a wedge narrow enough to win, and a route to revenue that does not depend on the rupee.
Pre-seed
Entry stage
$50–250K
Target first cheque
5–10%
Target ownership
First
Institutional money in
01
02
03
Why now
Six things changed at once.
Pakistani software has been exported for twenty years as billable hours. The conditions for exporting products instead have only recently arrived together.
The services bench is deep
Two decades of outsourcing produced engineers who have shipped to Western buyers. That is a product bench that has never been funded as one.
Distribution went self-serve
A category is now reachable from anywhere through search, community and API marketplaces. Presence in the buyer's city stopped being the gate.
Cost base is a real edge
A team here reaches default-alive on revenue that would not cover one Bay Area salary. Runway is the cheapest moat a young company can hold.
Returning operators
Senior people who scaled companies abroad are back, and want to build rather than advise. That changes what a first team can look like.
The first cheque is missing
Regional funds arrive at Series A with a metrics bar built elsewhere. The gap is the institutional cheque before that, written by someone who was in the room.
Wedge
Built in Pakistan, sold abroad.
We back software with an engineering centre of gravity here and a customer somewhere with hard currency. That combination is the single clearest advantage a company can start with, and it is the one we underwrite.
We are not a generalist fund. If the business needs a physical footprint in every city it serves, or a licence we cannot see a path to, it is a bad fit for us and we will say so in the first conversation.
- Developer and technical tools In scope
- Vertical SaaS for export buyers In scope
- AI applied to a named workflow In scope
- B2B fintech infrastructure In scope
- Marketplaces with one dense side In scope
- Consumer apps monetised by ads Out of scope
- Capital-heavy commerce and logistics Out of scope
- Licensed lending or deposit-taking Out of scope
What we do
A first cheque, and the work around it.
Capital is the easy half. The scarce half is the operating detail that turns a strong team here into a company a foreign investor can underwrite.
Get incorporated correctly
Delaware or ADGM topco, Pakistan subsidiary, clean cap table, IP assigned. Wrong at incorporation is expensive at Series A.
First ten customers abroad
We work the outbound list with you. Introductions we can actually make, not a logo wall of people we once met.
The next round
A written view of what a Gulf, London or US seed investor will ask, and the twelve months of evidence that answers it.
On the ground
Where the work actually happens.
Not a stock idea of a startup. Desks in Lahore and Karachi, a port that clears the freight, and a buyer on the other side of a time zone.
Tell us what you have shipped.
Not the deck. What the product does, who is using it, what they pay, and what the next twelve months would prove.