Myco scales on cricket and builds loyalty on every other sport

The startup everyone in Dubai kept mentioning

Muzamil opens with a name he has been hearing for two years. When he moved to Dubai, people interested in startups kept telling him to look at the Myco story. He met the founder a few times at Pakistani founder events in Dubai and tried for a long time to get the conversation on record. The Endeavor Pakistan series, which is looking for the country’s 50 most exciting startups and businesses, finally made it happen.

His guest is Umair Masoom Usmani, founder and CEO of Myco. Muzamil introduces it as a video streaming platform that now operates across several markets. On finesse and quality, Myco is the one he sees as a real long-term regional product.

A navy offer turned down, and work from the fourth semester

Umair was born in Islamabad. His father was a journalist who worked two jobs, at Pakistan Television and Radio Pakistan, mostly behind the scenes. The family was middle class, and his parents worked hard to send him and his sister to Bahria in the Naval Complex, then a target school for many Islamabad parents.

Most of his friends were children of senior naval officers, and for a while he wanted to be a naval engineer. He says he was one of two people in his class to clear the ISSB, and he got an offer from NUST in Karachi for naval engineering. His parents were thrilled. He came home and said he did not want it. Seniors from school had come back from that training crying, with burned and peeling skin, saying everyone gave them orders. “I don’t want to be following orders in my life,” he says. “I need to be giving orders, so I need to become a leader. How do I become a leader? I go to business school.”

His father had moved to Karachi as one of the first employees of Geo News in 2001, and the family followed. Umair planned to sit the IBA test but arrived after the date had passed. Friends told him CBM was the next best business school, its test was 20 days away, and he got in. He would still choose it today. At a more practical school he found the studies easy, and that left him time to work.

He had a 4.0 GPA for his first three semesters. Then, going into the fourth, he decided he needed a job. He opened Dawn one Saturday, found a walk-in interview at an auto magazine called Motor Magazine, and got the job selling ads. He admits there was also an unofficial reason: a girl he hoped to marry in time, who was six months older than him.

By the time he graduated with a BBA honours at the end of 2006, after an internship at Geo, he was assistant manager for sales and marketing for HBO at ARY Network, which held HBO’s distribution and sales rights in Pakistan. When ARY ran a management trainee program, some of his classmates, who had laughed at how hard he worked, applied, and Umair was on the other side of the table interviewing them. He finished an MBA on weekends at CBM by December 2007.

From TV ad sales to group CMO in Dubai

Umair felt he had outgrown sales and wanted to work as a marketer. He joined Faysal Bank as a marketing executive and was soon promoted to marketing manager. But traditional media was booming and his peers in it were earning more, so he went back. He worked at Pakistan Television over a couple of stints, at the newly launched Bol Network, and at A Plus, an entertainment channel in the ATV network. He held roles such as head of sales, head of marketing and chief commercial officer. His friends joke that he has had more visiting cards than they have had plans.

Bored again, he returned to banking as head of marketing at Burj Bank, before Al Baraka acquired it. That bank was co-owned by the Gargash Group, and its CEO became his long-time mentor and later his angel investor. Through that connection came an offer in Dubai in financial services marketing.

Umair did not want to leave Pakistan. His career was going well. But his younger brother and his sister were both in Dubai, his father had passed away in 2017, and his mother told him he had to go. He went for her, and within a year to a year and a half he was CMO for the whole group, with more than 30 brands and teams reporting to him.

He describes Gargash as one of the top business families in the UAE, built on the first exclusive Mercedes-Benz distribution in Dubai and spread across autos, real estate, hospitality and financial services, where he first joined Daman Investment. It was also an early investor in Tapmad, a Myco competitor. His employer later became his first investor.

Chaos, crypto and the idea behind Myco

Muzamil puts Umair in his thirties at the time, with a group CMO role in Dubai, the best cars and good money. His wife thought he was crazy to leave. Why do it?

He got used to chaos early in his career, and he says he made the same point in a TED talk. “If there’s not enough chaos, I’m not having fun,” he says. The Dubai job was the peak of his corporate career, but it was too structured. Over the past year, as Myco has become more sustainable, the restlessness has returned, and he has begun backing younger startups.

The idea itself came from two passions. One was media. He had worked across almost every kind of Pakistani media company and his father was a journalist. He believes media decides where a nation heads. The other was crypto. He read the Bitcoin white paper in 2016 or 2017, invested with friends, and did well in 2020 and 2021. That money gave him the financial standing to take the risk, but he says the vision interested him more than the returns. He read Satoshi’s eight-page paper many times and came away believing in decentralisation: give power to the end user and remove the middlemen.

He applied that to streaming. “If I can invest in stocks, bonds and crypto, why can’t I invest in a Netflix series?” he asks. Why can’t a viewer back a new filmmaker, or own a stake in cricket rights?

He describes today’s media economy as broken for all three of its stakeholders. Viewers have been turned into a commodity, so they feel no loyalty to any platform and earn nothing from their attention. Advertisers pay for ads that 99 percent of people skip, and he says only about 2 percent of an audience is really paying attention. Creators face high barriers to entry and almost no access to capital. His answer is to make viewers co-owners who are rewarded, engaged and able to invest. “Content is the best asset class,” he says. Myco’s stated vision is true power to viewers, built on blockchain.

Thirty million users and close to $10 million in revenue

Umair is open about the gap between that vision and today’s business. Others who followed the vision closely failed, he says, because they could not build something commercially viable. Myco first targeted the GCC and North America, which were more crypto native, but he saw it would burn all the capital he was raising. So he pivoted to Pakistan, focused on what was easiest and within the team’s strengths, and built a scale experiment he could prove.

Three and a half years in, he gives the numbers. Myco has 30 million registered users and around 10 million downloads across mobile and smart TV apps. Much of its reach comes through telco partners: users can find Myco inside the My Zong app, and reach its paid Premier League package through Tamasha, the Jazz app. Monthly active users average 7 to 8 million, dipping in months without cricket.

Myco has exclusive English Premier League rights for Pakistan and Bangladesh for the next three years. It also has Wimbledon and squash rights, and squash is a growing sport in both Pakistan and Egypt. The company has around 100 people across offices in Dubai, Karachi and Cairo. It is strongest in Pakistan and the UAE, decently placed in Egypt and Bangladesh, and has smaller audiences in the GCC and North America.

Revenue for the fiscal year that closed in June 2025 was $9.8 million. Umair says Myco is EBITDA positive, with a little more than a million dollars at that level, but still cash flow negative because content is paid for upfront and amortised over time. It has raised more than $25 million in equity and debt from investors in Silicon Valley, the US, the GCC and Europe, with the Gargash Group as the largest. Its blockchain partner, Aptos, has made more than $10 million in grant commitments toward the original vision. Tim Draper is an investor, and Umair says Myco was the first Pakistani startup to reach the final of Meet the Drapers, in season 9, where it won an investment. Republic and Factor 6 Capital have also invested. The aim is a regional platform across the Middle East, North Africa and the subcontinent outside India, and a listing in the UAE.

Why Pakistan, Bangladesh and Egypt

Muzamil points out that most founders in Dubai talk about Saudi Arabia, where the margins are. Why pick three struggling economies?

Umair gives three reasons. First, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar all have large streaming platforms owned directly or indirectly by the government through the national telco. Competing there means burning capital with little chance of winning. Pakistan, Egypt and Bangladesh look chaotic and unstructured, but their populations are young and ambitious. In the past year and a half, he says, Myco paid out 30 million micro payment rewards in Pakistan, sums of 5 or 50 rupees for watching content. That excites people who are striving.

Second, his success story was Pakistan, so similar countries came next. Third is the listing. To go public in the UAE you need either a big UAE customer base, which those government monopolies make hard, or a big brand among the UAE’s largest communities. After India, he asks Muzamil to guess the three biggest nationalities in the UAE. Muzamil names Egypt, Bangladesh and Pakistan. “There is a method to all the madness,” Umair says.

Free for scale, paid for what is exclusive

Muzamil says the site looks as if YouTube and Netflix had a child. Umair explains the freemium model. Anything non-exclusive goes out free with ads. Charging for cricket would be foolish, he says, when it is already free on PTV. Anything exclusive enough that people will pay for it goes behind a paywall, whether sport or entertainment.

Myco carries more than 30,000 watch hours of premium entertainment, including a lot of Arabic and Bangla content, plus live TV channels, documentaries, shorts and what he believes is the largest podcast library on any streaming platform in Pakistan.

Freemium matters because it builds a funnel. If Myco had to sell Premier League subscriptions through billboards and Facebook ads, the cost of acquiring each customer would be very high. With 21 million of its 30 million registered users in Pakistan, it can market to them for free. His reference point is JioHotstar in India, which he says has 300 million subscribers and 800 million registered users, built by focusing on one country and its diaspora.

About 94 percent of viewing is on mobile, mostly through mobile web rather than installed apps, and Android leads because most people in these markets cannot afford iPhones. The Pakistan subscription launched only three weeks before the recording at about 450 rupees, close to the $2 Myco was targeting. Most ad revenue still comes from live sport.

Why creators and dramas are on hold

Muzamil asks about creators like himself. YouTube is becoming noisy, he says, as every platform chases TikTok and quality drifts to the lowest common denominator. What is Myco’s pitch to a creator?

Umair starts with the problem as he sees it. Ask a student today what they want to be and the first answer is a content creator. If everyone becomes a creator, who is left to watch? His answer is to turn viewers into a community with a stake in the creator’s success. At launch Myco tried exactly that with open uploads. Out of every 100 rupees of ad revenue, it would keep about 10 for infrastructure, give the creator 60 against YouTube’s 50, and give the remaining 30 to the audience.

It did not work, because creator content at scale needs a programmatic ad network, and the only one is Google’s. Umair says it is not in Google’s interest to help a platform that rewards consumers, so the rates on offer made the model impossible. He adds that YouTube has blocked monetisation on Myco’s app several times over the rewards. Creator content is paused until a local ad network exists.

Muzamil asks why a TV ad cannot also run inside a podcast. Umair calls it a chicken and egg problem. Advertisers will pre-commit money to cricket, the Premier League or a big ARY drama, but not to a podcast. Moving impressions bought for cricket onto creator content would mean paying creators out of Myco’s own pocket. The shift will come when advertisers commit a budget and simply ask for impressions. Building Google’s kind of ad engine is a different business, he says, and he would rather back someone else to do it. “Everything that is direct to consumer today, everywhere in the world, is a monopoly,” he says. “So you have to choose which battle to fight.” He will not fight Etisalat in the UAE, and he sees YouTube as the hardest monopoly to crack.

Muzamil then raises dramas. He thinks Pakistan’s broadcasters sold themselves short by putting their dramas on YouTube for vanity view counts. Umair agrees. “YouTube is a big menace for original content creators and the local content economy,” he says. The money that leaves for YouTube is not reinvested in Pakistani production. He says sport is only about 20 percent of the opportunity and premium entertainment is 80 percent. He sees two possible outcomes. Broadcasters will partner with platforms like Myco, or someone like him will raise a $100 million cheque and pay top production houses to make digital-only content. Myco can already offer producers a minimum guarantee that covers their costs. The problem, he says, is that many people want a 60 percent return on top from a new platform.

Cricket for scale, other sports for loyalty

Muzamil asks whether Myco can build new sports audiences beyond the obvious rights. Umair says no Pakistani media company has put as much into alternate sports over the past two to three years. Myco sponsors around 20 athletes across different sports.

Squash is his clearest example. When Pakistan hosted an international under-21 squash event in Karachi, the first in close to two decades, no TV channel would produce it. Myco rented cameras, hired a team, and both streamed and produced it. It made an original documentary called The Comeback, sponsored junior champion Hamza Khan, partnered with the World Squash Federation and the PSA, and now holds exclusive squash rights in Pakistan, so any TV channel that wants them for the next five years has to come to Myco. It streamed MMA fighter Shahzaib Rind, a Myco athlete, in his fight against an Indian opponent, and has streamed karate and Brave events.

Women’s football is the project he is proudest of. Umair played football as a child in Karachi and knew women who went on to play for Pakistan. He pushed for a documentary, and Myco made Her Right to Play with the Pakistan Football Federation, with Unilever and Dove as partners. He says it was nominated at several film festivals and won awards, and some of the players later signed brand deals.

Digital now draws about half the cricket audience, he says, but takes only about 25 percent of the revenue against TV’s 75. That is why cricket is a scale play. “We’ve probably never burned a single rupee on cricket,” he says. The money Myco loses goes into the other sports. “Cricket is an opportunity to scale, but that’s not where you build loyalty.”

Muzamil makes the point behind the episode’s title. Sportspeople often complain that nobody watches them, as if playing earns an audience. Sport is entertainment, he says, and it needs packaging and rivalry to make people care, as India did when it took the IPL model to kabaddi. Umair agrees that a platform can build heroes and reach, and Myco does. Building events and leagues on the ground, though, needs federations, governments and above all brands, and he finds Pakistani brands far less willing to take risks than Indian ones.

Endeavor, and Pakistan in 2050

Umair first met the Endeavor Pakistan team about 18 months before the recording. Stories from Endeavor entrepreneurs, including Mudassir Sheikha, convinced him to apply. He has been through more than 20 interviews, financial reviews and the local selection panel, and was flying to Cambridge the following week for the final international panel.

Muzamil closes with his usual question: extrapolate what you see today and describe Pakistan in 2050. Umair says people blame the past decade on currency depreciation or falling investment. He thinks the biggest loss was human talent, as many exceptional people grew disheartened and left. He believes the cycle will turn and much of that talent will come back, as societies and family life change in the West. In 25 years, he says, Pakistan will be one of the most successful economies in the region and close to India’s success story, because the talent it produces will go on to change politics, the public sector, the private sector and technology.