Why Meenah Tariq raised exactly $900,000 — not more

“Businesses are held hostage by their fear of numbers”

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming back two returning guests — Meenah Tariq and Omar Parvez Khan — who had previously appeared on Thought Behind Things separately. This time they arrive together, and with news. Muzamil had spotted an Instagram post hinting at something new and reached out. The word that caught his eye was startup — coming from two people who had spent years on the investor side of the table.

Meenah sets the context quickly. Both she and Omar had made roughly eight investments each through their time at a VC fund. They were, by any measure, comfortable. But they felt they were too young to have settled into the investor role. “We felt we can contribute more to the world,” she says, “so we came back to the operator side.”

What they came back to was a problem they had watched up close for a decade: small businesses in Pakistan — and across emerging markets — cannot grow because they are terrified of their own finances.

“Businesses are held hostage by their fear of numbers,” Meenah says. “They’re not growing because they’re afraid of numbers. When you’re afraid of numbers, you don’t do your accounting. When you don’t do your accounting, you run a business at a loss — or at very thin margins — and you never realise it.”

Muzamil, who studied computer science and describes his own relationship with accounting as one of deliberate avoidance, finds this immediately recognisable. He used to tell his team not to discuss finances with him on Saturdays. The fear, he says, was real — not laziness.

Bookkeeping versus accounting — and why the gap matters

Omar draws a distinction that anchors the rest of the conversation. Bookkeeping, he explains, is record-keeping: ledgers, entries, transactions. Accounting is what you do with those records — the insights you extract. The first accounting statements ever produced (profit and loss, cash flow, balance sheet) were themselves a form of insight. Modern accounting goes further: ratio analysis, customer lifetime value, seasonality patterns, customer acquisition cost.

“Accounting is thought to be — or used to be thought to be — a cost center,” Omar says. “But modern accounting is actually a profit center if you do it right.”

The problem is that most accounting software was built for accountants, not founders. QuickBooks and its equivalents require an accountant to operate. They were never designed for the person running a home-based food business or a one-person candle operation. Meenah is direct about this: “I can’t use them. Omar is a chartered accountant — he can.”

The second problem is timing. Most small businesses in Pakistan do their accounting once a year, at tax time. “The year is already over,” Omar points out. “You can’t grow from insights that arrive twelve months late.”

What Metric actually does

Metric is an Android app, currently in closed beta, that automates accounting for small businesses and startups. The design principle is radical simplicity: no charts to fill in, no tables, no accounting vocabulary. A user photographs a receipt; the app reads it, records it, and derives data from it. The result is a live dashboard showing profit and loss, customer lifetime value, and business seasonality — updated in real time.

Muzamil asks whether the photo-to-data pipeline is genuinely automated or whether it just stores the image as a record. Omar confirms it does both: the image is kept as proof and the data is extracted from it. He acknowledges it is imperfect — handwritten receipts are harder to parse — but the system improves over time.

The free version covers the core accounting functionality. The paid version, priced at approximately 15,000 rupees per month, adds more sophisticated features — still cheaper, Meenah notes, than hiring even a basic bookkeeper.

At the time of recording, 150 businesses are on the waiting list, signed up with zero marketing spend. They come from Pakistan, New Zealand, Malta, the Philippines, and India. “We see this as a global issue,” Meenah says, “and a global solution.”

The AI layer and the personal assistant vision

Muzamil pushes on what he calls the “engine” — the intelligence underneath the interface. He draws a comparison to TikTok, which democratised content consumption by removing every barrier to entry, and asks whether Metric could eventually work by voice for a shopkeeper in rural Jhelum who navigates entirely through audio.

Omar reveals that both the CTO (based in Australia) and the head of engineering in Pakistan have backgrounds in artificial intelligence and machine learning. AI is not an afterthought — it is structural. On the input side, voice recognition is a planned evolution. On the output side, the app will eventually offer competitive benchmarking: telling a home-based food business in Hyderabad that similar businesses in the region have a customer acquisition cost of 300 rupees while theirs is 500, and suggesting specific actions to close the gap.

“These are insights that even an accountant can’t give you,” Omar says, “unless they’re working with a hundred businesses like yours and anonymising the data.”

Meenah connects this to her field experience. She personally trained between 700 and 800 entrepreneurs across Pakistan — in Attock, Nowshera, Bahawalpur, Multan — people running necessity-based businesses far outside the Karachi-Lahore-Islamabad corridor. “If I build a product only for people who are comfortable and sophisticated like me,” she says, “that is not the point. The point is to make it so simple and accessible that the entrepreneurs who told me face to face — Meenah, we need something like this, this problem is stopping our business from growing — can actually use it.”

Muzamil raises the idea of gamification: streaks, confetti on entry, progressive feature unlocking as a business matures. Meenah confirms these are already in the product. “A lot of financial products are intimidating from the first click,” she says. “If the app is a personal assistant that eases you in — just do this one thing right now — that changes the relationship entirely.”

The fintech roadmap: payments, lending, and the rails problem

Later in the discussion, Muzamil sketches the obvious long-term play: Metric as a data engine that eventually enables credit scoring, wallets, and lending for businesses that are currently invisible to the formal financial system.

Omar confirms the thesis without hesitation. “Every fintech in the world is going towards two things — payments or lending. And every startup in the world is going towards being a fintech.” The difference is which layer of the economy each company is digitising first. For Metric, that layer is the SME — above the karyana store (which needs a cashbook, not an accounting suite) and below the large corporate (which already has an ERP). Home-based food businesses, candle makers, gym instructors, software houses, IoT startups, doctor’s clinics — these are the target.

The constraint is infrastructure. Pakistan’s open banking rails do not yet exist in a reliable form. RAAST is being built; neo banks and challenger banks are emerging. Meenah and Omar have already begun conversations with newer banks about debit card integrations and direct payment flows. “As soon as you can connect directly to the bank,” Omar says, “the automation limit increases tenfold.” The product roadmap has been written. It is a matter of switching features on as the rails become solid enough to trust.

The smarter play, both agree, is partnerships rather than building every layer in-house. Metric provides the data intelligence; a lending partner provides the capital; a wallet partner handles the payments. “You make money, I make money, we’re both happy,” Muzamil summarises. They agree.

The $900,000 raise — and the pressure to take more

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil circles back to the announcement that prompted the episode. Metric has raised $900,000 as a pre-seed round. Investors include I2I Ventures, DeoSei, Kino Capital, Ratio Ventures, and a syndicate of angel investors — notably, a group of chartered accountants who put money in after a full product demo. “That was the hardest call,” Meenah says. “They asked every possible accounting question. And then they invested.”

The number itself carries a story. Meenah and Omar had targeted $800,000. They raised $100,000 more than planned. But they were pressured — by investors with large funds and genuine enthusiasm — to take nearly double the amount. They declined.

“We know from the investor side of the table what happens if you get the fundamentals wrong,” Meenah explains. “If we make that mistake now, we will pay for it at the next round.” She describes watching startups come to them for investment readiness consulting, receive a valuation estimate, and then walk into their first investor call quoting a figure four or five times higher. “Because of what was happening last year, everyone thought their valuation should be $20 million plus. Doesn’t matter who you are, what your idea is, what the market size is.”

Omar is more blunt about the broader pattern. Pakistan’s startup boom and its frenzy arrived almost simultaneously — a compression that normally takes years. Founders who raised at inflated valuations in 2021 now have to justify those numbers at Series A with real execution metrics. “If they can’t raise at considerably larger valuations in the next twelve to eighteen months,” he says, “things will get difficult again.”

What Pakistan needs to get to 2050

Muzamil closes with a question he asks most guests: what does a successful Pakistan look like in 2050, and what does it require?

Omar’s answer is direct: embrace technology and digitisation, and keep an open mind about what that means — including crypto and decentralised systems. He cites the UAE’s creation of a crypto regulatory body as an example of the right kind of institutional thinking. “The future belongs to those who build it.”

Meenah points to something more specific and more recent: the quiet institutional reform that happened inside Pakistan’s State Bank and SECP over the last few years. Company registration, once a months-long ordeal, can now be completed in a day. Tax filing has been substantially automated. “There has to be a reason why international investors decided Pakistan was suddenly less risk,” she says. “The population was always this large. That didn’t change in the last two years.”

Both converge on a third factor: founder maturity. The mistakes being made now — inflated valuations, misaligned fundraising, poor financial fundamentals — are not malicious. They are the mistakes of a first startup. When these same founders build their second and third companies, the quality of the ecosystem will compound. “Beyond three years,” Omar says, “I would lean heavily toward the optimism side of that equation.”