Pakistan's first female-founded VC fund on what's broken

From a conflict resolution master’s to a defense contractor to a blog about Pakistan

The episode opens with Muzamil noting that he had been trying to get Kalsoom Lakhani on the show for the better part of a year — and that she finally showed up on a day when long marches were descending on Islamabad and most other guests had cancelled. It is a fitting entry point for someone whose entire career has been shaped by showing up in places others found too difficult.

Kalsoom was born in Dubai to a Bangladeshi mother and a Pakistani father, grew up in Dhaka until she was eleven, then moved to Islamabad. She graduated from the International School in 2000 and went to the University of Virginia, where she intended to study film. Her first politics class changed that. “I fell in love with it,” she says. “I loved the idea of looking at the way that historically countries have developed against each other.” Being a young Pakistani Muslim in the United States during the September 11 attacks sharpened that instinct into something more urgent — a sense of responsibility about narrative and identity.

She went on to do a master’s in conflict resolution in Washington DC, which she describes as almost an extension of her own biography: “Being Bangladeshi and Pakistani already is conflict resolution in itself.” Her first job was in defense contracting — the opposite of conflict resolution, she admits — working as an analyst on counterinsurgency messaging during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. She hated it, felt disempowered, and started a current affairs blog about Pakistan called Chup (or Changing Up Pakistan) at night, writing about filmmakers, artists, and changemakers that mainstream media was ignoring. The blog gave her something her day job did not: a voice on her own terms.

Misbah’s path: from Citibank to Acumen to a fintech startup nobody had heard of

Misbah Naqvi’s route was different in texture but similar in its non-linearity. She grew up between Karachi and Islamabad as a navy brat, did her MBA at IBA in 1997, and joined Citigroup on the corporate banking side. Five years in, she realized she was going through the motions. “I didn’t want my boss’ job. I wasn’t excited about the things my peers were excited about.” When the bank needed someone to move into public affairs — a role her colleagues thought was a demotion — she put her hand up.

That move brought her into Citigroup Foundation’s work in Pakistan, including earthquake relief in Kashmir, and eventually into the orbit of Acumen, the social venture fund. Acumen was entering Pakistan and needed a country manager. Misbah joined and spent years going into bastis and kachchi abadis, sitting with people to understand how they made financial decisions and what they lacked access to. “It gave me a chance to see my own country in a way that I hadn’t before,” she says.

After Acumen, she joined Valoro, a fintech startup focused on dynamic password authentication, as employee number two. She was building in markets like Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, and South Africa. “It gave me an appreciation for founders and startups, but also looking at how big these opportunities are in markets like ours.” She stayed nearly five years, then planned a sabbatical. Kalsoom heard the word sabbatical and took it as an invitation. The sabbatical lasted two months before Misbah joined i2i Ventures.

How Invest2Innovate was born — and how it survived

Kalsoom’s pivot from venture philanthropy inside her family office to founding Invest2Innovate in 2011 came from a specific frustration: she kept meeting extraordinary young founders in Pakistan, connecting them to the global impact investing circuit, and then checking in four or five months later to find nothing had happened. “Just because you exist in a place that might be hard to do business doesn’t mean we shouldn’t support that potential,” she says.

Invest2Innovate launched Pakistan’s first startup accelerator. The first batch ran over five weekends in Lahore with five companies, using space that LUMS provided for free, with roughly $6,000 in the bank. “We had money,” Kalsoom says, with audible irony. The program grew — more cities, longer cohorts, a demo day format — and eventually expanded to Bangladesh and Southeast Asia as other governments and development organizations came asking for the curriculum.

Muzamil presses on the obvious question: who funded this for the first seven years? The answer is uncomfortable but honest. “Credit card debt. Years,” Kalsoom says. Corporate sponsorships for the accelerator, small project contracts from the World Bank, IFC, Australian government, and Facebook came later. “It was not a very lucrative business for the first seven years. It was keeping the lights on.” Misbah adds that Kalsoom’s flexibility was key — if sponsorship came in for eight companies, she ran the program with eight. She never waited for perfect conditions.

What i2i Ventures actually backs, and why

i2i Ventures opened its doors in August 2019. It is an early-stage fund investing at pre-seed and seed, with no fixed sector mandate but a clear filter: have-to-have problems, not nice-to-have ones. By the time of this recording, the fund had approved its thirteenth investment.

Misbah walks through the portfolio. In fintech: Abhi (earned wage access), CreditBook (MSME credit chain), Safepay (payments for e-commerce merchants), Uran (female-first fintech starting with committees), and Metric. In logistics: Truck It In (freight) and Rider (last-mile e-commerce). In agri-tech: Taza. In marketplaces: DealKart (group buying for middle and lower income segments). In ed-tech: Edkasa (exam prep). In communications: Teletalk. And Easy Bike, the electric vehicle company that Muzamil describes as one of the investments he is most excited about in the entire ecosystem.

On Easy Bike, Kalsoom is direct about what the bet actually was: “We believed in Ali and Hadi. That’s what the bet was.” The original concept — Roamer — was not what i2i backed. But when Easy Bike emerged and petrol prices started climbing, the founders’ quality became the thesis. “With EZ Bike, it’s all about the founders. A hundred percent.”

The 2021 boom, the 2022 correction, and what it actually means

Muzamil raises the funding drought directly. Misbah’s answer is measured. Opportunistic money has left Pakistan, she says, and it was never going to stay. “That money was never strategic money to begin with. That money could dry up at any time.” What remains is investors who genuinely believe in the opportunity — and those, she argues, are still there.

Kalsoom goes further, questioning the framing of “pivot to profitability” as a response to the correction. “Why was that never not the case to begin with?” The 2021 boom was a convergence of specific factors: remote diligence became normalized during COVID, the holding company legislation passed and allowed founders to set up offshore structures, and global funds had excess capital with nowhere obvious to put it. “When you unpack the reasons and come back to right now, that money was never going to be there for the long term anyway.”

Both partners are medium-to-long-term bullish. What they expect to change is the character of the market: fewer deals at inflated valuations, more focus on fundamentals, and a natural selection toward founders who were building real businesses rather than chasing the next round. “Good business models and good founders will still find money,” Misbah says.

Pakistan’s fintech problem is a government incentive problem

Muzamil raises what he calls the most important opportunity in Pakistan’s economy: digital payments. He notes that twelve percent of Pakistanis have bank accounts, that mobile top-ups remain the dominant use case for most fintech apps, and that somehow the market is not moving. He asks Misbah — the self-described “grumpy granddad on fintech calls” — what is actually going on.

Her answer has two parts. First, the push is broken: merchants are actively disincentivized to digitize because doing so brings them into the tax net. “There is a deterrent to digitization.” Second, the pull has not arrived yet: consumers have not yet experienced enough convenience from digital payments to change behavior. She points to COVID as a moment when the pull factor briefly appeared — people ordered food online, paid by card, realized they did not have to be home for cash on delivery — and argues that pull will come, but slowly.

On credit scoring, Muzamil makes the case for a neutral data intermediary — a third party with no products of its own that aggregates data from across the ecosystem using a unique identifier like the NIC. Misbah agrees the direction is right but flags the privacy question. “I may not want my data being shared, but I’m okay sharing it where I have an independent relationship with you.” She points to Raast as a potentially important piece of infrastructure — it reduces transaction costs significantly — but notes it is still in early days and has not yet achieved the kind of adoption that UPI achieved in India.

Agri, SaaS, and the question of which capital fits which problem

Later in the discussion, Muzamil asks about the spaces that remain underdeveloped. Kalsoom names SaaS as the most underexplored: “Baksani companies building for the world.” She cites Metric as an example in the i2i portfolio. Misbah adds health tech and education as sectors where the opportunity is enormous but where venture capital may not be the right instrument.

This leads to one of the sharpest exchanges in the conversation. Misbah argues that the startup ecosystem has developed a bad habit of measuring success by whether a company raises venture funding. “Not every startup should raise venture capital. You should identify what kind of investment is right for you.” Some models need patient capital. Some need grants. Some need revenue-based financing. “Venture money kind of ruins some sectors,” Kalsoom adds. “It just forces people to say I need to grow this fast. But education is not something that can be solved tomorrow.”

On agri specifically, both partners are bullish on the long-term opportunity but careful about the venture fit. Taza is in the portfolio. The thesis was not just the mandi-to-retailer supply chain that most players attacked — it was the founders’ willingness to think about Pakistan’s produce reaching global markets. “What if Baksan’s produce could go to the world?” Kalsoom says. “These very audacious ideas that not a lot of other players are thinking about.”

The structural economic problem that startups cannot solve

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil pushes both guests toward the harder question: Pakistan’s problem is not inefficiency, it is insufficient wealth generation. Startups are optimizing leakages. They are not creating the additional pool of money the economy needs. He cites the comparison between Pakistan’s entire defense budget and the New York Police Department’s budget to illustrate the scale of the gap.

Kalsoom’s answer is a frustration more than a solution. “We’ve never had leadership that has been strategic in this country that has said, how do we rebuild the foundations from an economic standpoint?” Every government thinks in one-to-two-year cycles. No one wants to do something whose benefits will accrue to a successor. “We’re so extractive in how we behave as a society that we never come from a place of abundance.”

Misbah frames it differently: political leaders respond to public sentiment, and public sentiment is shaped by education and poverty. The voter who accepts a biryani at a rally and then has to go back to work the next day is not irrational — he has no other leverage. “It’s this cycle of poverty and education that makes things harder.” Her prescription is institutional building on meritocracy, a national agenda with a few non-negotiable commitments that no government touches regardless of ideology, and accountability at the grassroots level.

Both partners point to the 2021 holding company legislation and the State Bank’s fintech sandbox as evidence that good policy leadership can unlock entire sectors quickly. Misbah was on the working group. “That was a game changer,” Kalsoom says. “If you can change the policies, this can unlock so much.” The challenge is that the same openness to disruption has not reached industries with powerful incumbents — sugar, textiles, automotive — where the power dynamic is entirely different.

On Pakistan in 2050, Kalsoom is honest about the gap between what she sees and what she wants. She wants a startup ecosystem that is inclusive beyond English-speaking graduates with foreign degrees, that is on the global radar without surprising anyone, and that has produced exits large enough to seed the next generation of founders. On the broader country, she says: “I wouldn’t be doing this work if I wasn’t an internal optimist. But it’s hard to stay optimistic.” She wants real leadership, diversity of political voices, and an end to perpetual default. Misbah wants the same, and adds one specific wish: that by 2050, Pakistan has moved past the cycle of two steps forward and one step back, and is on a clear trajectory of improvement rather than sliding back every few years.