Friday, Jan 23, 2026 | 03 Shaban 1447
Friday, Jan 23, 2026 | 03 Shaban 1447
Epic Angels, the world’s largest all-female investment collective, has announced its participation in the Pre-Series A funding round of Neem, a Pakistani fintech, in a move aimed at accelerating the growth of the country’s full-stack payments infrastructure platform.
Joining the Pre-Series A investment round alongside Epic Angels are DNI Group, Hi2 Global, AKD, supported by existing seed investors including SparkLabs Ventures, Outrun Ventures, Arif Habib, and MyAsiaVC, as well as strategic angels from Stripe, PayNet, Aspire, and other global fintech and payments leaders, according to a company statement.
Talking to Business Recorder, Neem’s co-founder, Vladimira Briestenska, said that Epic Angels invested in the fintech as it is building foundational financial infrastructure in a large, under-digitised market at exactly the right moment.
“Neem stood out for its full-stack platform, combining collections, disbursements, and branded wallets and ledger system, and its early enterprise traction across logistics, insurance, and e-commerce.
“Beyond the market opportunity, Epic Angels had strong conviction in Neem’s experienced founding team, including the leadership of a strong woman founder, and the team’s ability to execute at scale,” she said.
Founded by Vladimira Briestenska, Nadeem Shaikh, and Naeem Zamindar, Neem commercially went to market in January 2025. The platform has scaled rapidly, growing transaction volumes by over 30% month-on-month, and currently supports 50+ B2B businesses across logistics, insurance, healthcare, e-commerce, and agriculture.
According to the company, Pakistan’s payments ecosystem remains highly fragmented, with businesses often relying on multiple payment providers to collect revenue, pay vendors, and manage payroll. This results in operational inefficiencies, manual reconciliation, and limited real-time financial visibility for enterprises and SMEs across key sectors of the economy.
“Neem is addressing these challenges by building a full-stack payments platform that enables collections, disbursements, and branded wallets through a single API, similar to how modern payments infrastructure platforms operate in more developed markets,” the company said.
Briestenska noted that Neem’s growth strategy is focused on winning large enterprises by offering an integrated infrastructure layer rather than isolated payment use cases.
“While many players in Pakistan focus on isolated use cases, such as collections only or consumer wallets, Neem is differentiated as a full-stack payment infrastructure provider that unifies collections, disbursements, and branded enterprise wallet and ledger systems.
“This approach resonates strongly with large businesses that currently juggle multiple providers to manage revenue, payouts to multiple stakeholders, payroll, and reconciliation.
By integrating deeply into enterprise workflows and offering a single, compliant infrastructure layer, Neem reduces operational complexity and becomes increasingly embedded and difficult to replace.”
She added that this enterprise-led strategy allows Neem to consolidate its share in a fragmented market and scale organically through expansion within existing client ecosystems.
On geographic expansion, Briestenska said Neem remains firmly focused on Pakistan as its core growth engine.
“At the same time, Neem is selectively exploring adjacent, use-case-driven expansion, particularly in areas such as cross-border remittance rails that naturally extend from its existing platform and enterprise relationships.
“The strategy is to build depth locally first, while laying the groundwork for scalable, cross-border flows where there is clear regulatory alignment and commercial demand.”
The funds raised will be used to scale Neem’s technology infrastructure, strengthen cybersecurity and data protection, expand enterprise partnerships, and accelerate onboarding across key sectors, including logistics, insurance, healthcare, e-commerce, and agriculture.
Explaining Epic Angels’ investment motive, Maaike Doyer, Founding and Managing Partner at Epic Angels, said global payments giants remain concentrated in developed markets, leaving substantial room in emerging economies.
“Big players like Stripe and Adyen collectively hold less than 10% of the global payments market and are focused on established markets, leaving a massive opportunity for local platforms like Neem.”
“With large enterprises across logistics, insurance, and agriculture already signed, Neem is well-positioned to become the financial operating system powering Pakistan’s digital economy.”
Epic Angels support early-stage, female-led startups in APAC (Asia-Pacific) and LATAM (Latin America) with capital, mentoring and a global network. The network counts over 800 female angel investors and has made 44 investments to date across industries.
