Around the world, 2022 has been painful. The world of startups and venture capital has been no different. We started hearing startups lay off people as early as the beginning of Q2, followed by a series of startups shutting down or significantly reducing their operations. The rest of the year has continued the trend. Having worked with so many founders and investors over the years, we do empathize with all the stakeholders. For Metric, however, 2022 has been a great year and we continue to accelerate despite the macro environment.

Since our last fundraise (9 months ago), our GTV Run-rate has increased by 104% and our ARR has grown by 204% (uncaptured due to our well advertised failure around payments), and by 70% actually received. Within 1.5 quarters of public launch, this is extremely promising. Regular accounting for small businesses is a mental and behavioral shift for founders, who find it difficult, boring, scary and anxiety inducing. This behavior shift is happening faster than we expected it to.

We have found partnerships and demos to be a great avenue of customer acquisition. We have been able to partner with 30 organizations, including 5 outside of pakistan. We have conducted 20 demos, and directly taught 800 plus businesses in Pakistan, Dubai, Sharjah and Palestine, over the last three months, how to manage their finances better. This number continues to grow as we experiment with various partnership models. In the works are deeper partnerships with UBank (240 branches across 210 cities in Pakistan), and payment gateway PayMob (Egypt, Pakistan and UAE penetration).

We have now touched 91 countries in 6 months, and the alternative data on small businesses has been blowing us away. The possibilities of what can be layered on top of Metric are endless and exciting. We have had conversations with organizations such as S&P Global around the kind of data and insights that would be invaluable in the future. Emerging markets are generally very opaque, and there is very little real data that allows for business decisions or even policy decisions based on what the reality on ground is. We plan to release a small report around this soon.

The shift in focus towards revenue works in our favor. We were already post-revenue when we raised our pre-seed, and have multiple established revenue streams. Subscriptions are actually the latest stream, even though it’s the stream we want to focus on the most.

We went to +92 Disrupt in Karachi in October, where Meenah was also a speaker on a panel. We shared all our latest numbers, and the response was overwhelmingly positive.

With a successful launch, high growth and a runway of 14 months on our side, we have built a lot of momentum going into our Seed round which we’ll open in January. We will be raising USD 2.5m. As we gear up for fundraising and get all our fundraising assets prepared, we’ll be reaching out to all of you for intros and references etc.

We are super excited with what we have achieved in a risk-off environment, and can’t wait to kill it in 2023!

– OpK & Meenah