“Winter is coming” goes the house motto of the Starks of Winterfell in the television series Game of Thrones based on the books by George RR Martin. In Pakistan, the fundraising winter is not just here, but likely to be a very, very long one, and the few startups still alive are the ones who have mentally adjusted to that reality.
One of those is Trukkr, the B2B software company focused on providing and enterprise resource planning (ERP) tool to the trucking industry in Pakistan. The company is now cash-flow positive, according to its founders, and is reliant mainly on its own internally generated cash flow for survival, recognizing the low likelihood of large sums of venture capital being made available to Pakistani startups any time soon.
Building a startup from scratch and getting it to cash flow breakeven is an impressive enough feat on its own, but what makes it more so is the fact that the company raised one of Pakistan’s largest seed rounds, announcing in March 2023 that they had raise $6.4 million from leading investors like Accion Venture Lab and Sturgeon Capital.
The temptation to spend relatively large sums of money early in a start-up’s evolution can be quite high, and most Pakistani startups that were funded in the heady days of 2021 and 2022 have flamed out in large part because they spent very freely without having a game plan to reach financial sustainability within a reasonable time frame.
To borrow terminology from the startup accelerator Y Combinator, they were never “default alive”.
So how did Trukkr pull it off? Well, it helps that the business is run by a founding team that has a family history in the trucking business, and so had a running head start in knowing the challenges of the industry. The content in this publication is expensive to produce. But unlike other journalistic outfits, business publications have to cover the very organizations that directly give them advertisements. Hence, this large source of revenue, which is the lifeblood of other media houses, is severely compromised on account of Profit’s no-compromise policy when it comes to our reporting. No wonder, Profit has lost multiple ad deals, worth tens of millions of rupees, due to stories that held big businesses to account. Hence, for our work to continue unfettered, it must be supported by discerning readers who know the value of quality business journalism, not just for the economy but for the society as a whole.To read the full article, subscribe and support independent business journalism in Pakistan
