Iqbal Ali Lakhani

Chairman

Mr. Iqbal Ali Lakhani is the Chairman of the Lakson Group of Companies, five of which are listed on the Stock Exchanges of Pakistan covering a diversified range of businesses such as paper & board, soap, detergents and toothpaste, printing & packaging, food and insurance. Three Funds of a Group Investment Company are also listed and traded. American franchises/affiliation includes Colgate-Palmolive Company & McDonalds Corporation. The spectrum of unlisted Companies includes textiles, surgical instruments, media (T.V. & Print), software development & consultancy, travel & tourism, investment & mutual funds, ISP-broad band & data centre, business process outsourcing house into call centre & I.T. The businesses of the Lakson Group provide gainful employment to over 12,000 persons.

Mr. Lakhani has over 39 years experience of Senior Management in consumer marketing, finance, manufacturing, industry and government relations. Areas of special interest cover marketing, total quality management and leadership. He is a Charter Member of The Indus Entrepreneurs and Director of Pakistan Business Council. In addition, he is also on the Board of Trustees of the Layton Rahmatullah Benevolent Trust. Previously he has served as the Chairman Cigarette Manufacturers Association of Pakistan, Chairman Aga Khan Economic Planning Board for Pakistan and Vice President American Business Council of Pakistan.

Mr. Lakhani received his B.A. from the University of California – Berkeley. He was a member of the PSI-National Accounting fraternity; Honor Student’s Society, member of Phi Beta Kappa and received the departmental award for outstanding undergraduate achievement.

Mr. Lakhani has travelled widely and has attended international seminars, meetings and conferences in several countries of the world.

Gaite Ali

(Independent)

Gaite Ali was a Chief Financial Officer, Managing Director, and Portfolio Manager at Morgan Stanley Investment Management Inc. She is part of the emerging markets equity team focusing on Latin America. She joined the firm in 2007. Prior to this, she was a Portfolio Manager at AllianceBernstein. Ms. Ali has extensive investment experience. She received an M.B.A. in Finance and an M.A. in International Affairs from Columbia University and a B.A. in History from Vassar College.

Jamil A. Mughal

Mr. Mughal has over 22 years of experience in marketing, public relations and real estate development. He is currently serving as the Chief Marketing, Development & Supply Chain Officer at McDonald’s Pakistan.

Mr. Mughal received his Business Planning Process certification from Hamburger Marketing University, Oak Brook, Chicago and his Bachelor of Engineering from Mehran University of Engineering & Technology.

He frequently provides professional representation and brand ambassadorship at numerous forums, events and panels. Mr. Mughal has also been a guest speaker on various occasions to academia such as I.B.A, A.M.I & SZABIST Karachi.

Mr. Mughal has travelled across most of Europe, U.S.A, Middle East, Asia, Australia and the Far East on professional career assignments & professional development initiatives.

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend

(Independent)

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is Director, Retirement Security at the Economic Policy Institute. She Founded the Center for Retirement Security at Georgetown University where she is a Research Professor.

She has served with distinction in both the private and public arenas. She was Maryland’s first woman Lt Governor, and served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the United States.

Prior to serving at the Department of Justice, Ms. Townsend led the fight to make Maryland the first—and only—state to make service a high school graduation requirement.

She has been a Managing Director of Rock Creek the largest women owned asset management firm, with state pension funds, foundation, unions and corporate pension funds for clients.

She has been appointed Special Advisor at the Department of State. She is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, has taught foreign policy at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Maryland and has been a visiting Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. In the mid-1980s, she founded the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award.

She Chaired the Institute of Human Virology founded by Dr. Robert Gallo, which treats over 700,000 patients in Africa as part of the PEPFAR program, has chaired the Robert Kennedy Memorial, has chaired the Center for Popular Democracy, and has been on the Board of Directors of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. She Co-chairs Arizona State University’s School of Civic & Economic Thought Leadership. She also co-founded Civic Works, a non-profit that strengthens Baltimore’s communities through education, skills development, and community service for over 20 years.

She has served on a number of boards including the Export-Import Bank, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), the Wilderness Society, the Points of Light Foundation, the National Catholic Reporter and the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, the Baltimore Urban League, the Center for American Progress, Lightbridge Corporation, and New Tower Trust, and . Ms. Townsend is also a member of the Council of Foreign Relations and the Inter-American Dialogue. She is the Vice-Chair of the Future of Science conference held in Venice Italy.

An honors graduate of Harvard University, Ms. Townsend received her law degree from the University of New Mexico where she was a member of the law review. She has received fourteen honorary degrees. Ms. Townsend’s book, Failing America’s Faithful: How Today’s Churches Mixed God with Politics and Lost Their Way has been published by Warner Books in March 2007.

Jacques John Visser

(Independent)

Jacques Visser is presently the Chief Legal Officer of a UAE Government related agency and has more than 20-year experience as a financial services lawyer in a variety of jurisdictions.

He specialized in multi-jurisdictional investment structures, funds, asset management and regulatory matters with particular focus on alternative and emerging markets investment strategies and related M&A transactions. He was the lead adviser on a number of landmark funds and investment structures and deal emanating from Middle East, Asia and Africa over the past number of year.

Prior to taking up his current position, Mr Visser was a National Partner at Dechert LLP in Dubai where he co-headed the firm’s Financial Services Group practice. In that capacity he was listed by The Legal 500 as one of the top three most notable legal practitioners in the Investment fund industry in the UAE and recognized by MENA Fund Manager as one of the top 50 most influential individuals in the investment funds industry in the MENA region. Dechert LLP is globally known for its investment funds and regulatory legal practice in 27 offices around the world and is ranked in the top-tier in both the US and Europe in this regard.

Mr. Visser was also one of the Funding Partners and Managing Director of DIFC-based Algebra Capital, which was sold to Franklin Templeton Investments in January 2011, subsequent to which he served as Executive Managing Director at Franklin Templeton Investment (Middle East) Ltd.

Mr. Visser presently also serves as an advisory board member of a technology start-up in the Middle East and as a director in a healthcare services company in the United Kingdom.

He holds a Master’s degree in Banking and Capital Markets Law and is admitted to practice law in his native Africa since 1995.

Year of Investment: 2019

Headquarters: Islamabad, Pakistan

Website Link: https://www.knowledgeplatform.com/

Knowledge Platform (Private) Limited is a leading Pakistani Education Tech platform providing ‘nextgeneration’ learning solutions for the Pakistani and South East Asian markets.

Founded in 2000, Knowledge Platform has developed thousands of e-learning and blended learning courses delivered through its dynamic learning management system that currently caters to 200,000+ students, teachers and corporate professionals in Pakistan. In just two years, Knowledge Platform’s blended learning solution, branded as Learn Smart Classroom, has scaled to over 350 low-cost private and public schools in
Kyber Pakhtunkawa (KPK), Punjab, Gilgit Baltistan, Azad Kashmir and Sindh.

In Pakistan, all digital lessons are aligned with the country’s national curriculum, and then further tailored to meet the needs of each specific school’s textbooks and their respective provincial board. When a teacher launches the system, the content flows similar to how it is laid out in the student textbooks. Furthermore, each student is provided with a low-cost clicker, so that they may be able to individually partake in dynamically generated digital assessments at the end of each lesson. KP now has a question bank of over
25,000 questions, allowing teachers to spend more time providing instant feedback to students, rather than spending hours and weeks creating, and then manually grading, quizzes and assessments. KP’s in-depth and interactive dashboards and analytics provides a vast cross-section of student, teacher, principal and regional performance data, and extrapolates learning outcomes levels on an individual and benchmarked basis by assessing over 450 data-points.

This data-driven approach to K-12 education allows for detailed and transparent performance management, as well as allowing KP to focus on incorporating A.I to provide personalized learning pathways for each learner, as well as Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the form of a “grammar checker” to help learners with practical applications (such as comprehension writing), rather than just focusing on the theoretic and fundamentals of language learning.

Learn Smart Classroom demonstrated its effectiveness by improving student performance by an average of 60% in sample of 26,000 female public-school students. Furthermore, but using a delivery strategy that most “Generation Z” learners prefer (animated videos and interactive games and assessments), KP’s solution is witnessed as having a greater impact on students in the lower quartiles of the class. In order words, while it may help top-performing students do better in class, it especially helps students who are at risk of failing and dropping out to gain better conceptual understanding, achieve pass rates and instill confidence amongst them to continue their education journey.

Looking forward, KP is well-poised to further cement its leadership position in the K-12 education space, as well as grow its presence in complementing areas such as teacher training and certification, skills training and project-based learning.

Year of Investment: 2020

Headquarters: Karachi, Pakistan

Website Link: https://www.mandiexpress.pk/

MandiExpress is the leading online fresh produce and grocery delivery service in Pakistan. The company has a data-driven approach to fulfilment of B2B and B2C consumer orders. The company has documented the value-chain at the Karachi ‘Sabzi Mandi” utilizing a vertically integrated technology platform that autonomously gathers price data for its buyers located at daily auctions. This allows MandiExpress to buy the highest grade produce at the lowest prices through real-time price discovery for customer orders received the night-before.

MandiExpress has warehouses at the Sabzi Mandi where it purchases, sorts, grades and custom-packages high quality produce from farmers and auctions, for delivery to its online customers. The company is leveraging a sourcing practice called ‘Just In Time’ that minimises waste from an industry average of 40% to less than 1%, reducing the lead time between farm-to-table from 1 to 5 days to less than 24 hours.

The service is popular amongst consumers in Karachi and Lahore. Customers can procure vegetables, fruits, meats and seafood, as well as select organic and gourmet foods (dairy, nuts, berries and cheeses) that are not always available at local retailers. The household delivery business is just one of their four business segments. They also cater to popular restaurants and large organisations, other ecommerce platforms as well as trading inside the wholesale markets.

IThe market for fresh produce is over $50 billion in Pakistan, accounting for 20% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Pakistan has some of the lowest yields per acre in the world and many farmers are struggling to make ends meet due to the extraction of value by the multiple stakeholders in the value-chain.

MandiExpress’ platform is aggregating data that will eventually help farmers with fairer price discovery as well as direct market access. Moreover, the platform aims to become the facilitator of financial inclusion for farmers and middlemen in the fresh produce supply chain through its data-driven approach of documenting payment cycles and seasonality in the farm to table value-chain.

Year of Investment: 2020

Headquarters: Karachi, Pakistan

Website Link: https://wwww.bagallerydeals.com

Pakistan’s largest beauty and fashion e-commerce platform Bagallery.com on Thursday announced that it closed a $900,000 Pre-Series A funding round from Lakson Venture Capital (LVC).

Bagallery (Private) Limited started out in 2013 with simple Facebook and Instagram (@worldofbagallery) pages for beauty and fashion products, quickly garnering a large following with their influencer-driven model.

Motivated by the enormous demand the husband and wife co-founders, Salman and Mina, launched a native e-commerce platform with dedicated operations and fulfilment teams in 2017.

The company has since seen tremendous growth to become the beauty and fashion segment market leader and is ranked among the top e-commerce traffic generators in Pakistan with 94% female visitors.

“We are really excited to have received LVC’s backing at a time when Bagallery is growing rapidly. The funding will allow us to expand to multiple cities in Pakistan by upgrading our technology stack, inventory management systems and logistics partnerships to efficiently scale,” said Mina Salman, co-founder of Bagallery.com.

The fashion industry dominates the global B2C e-commerce space with a 30% share in total B2C e-commerce revenues.

According to Euromonitor, the beauty and personal care market in Pakistan is projected to be in excess of $30 billion by 2023. Bagallery focuses on authentic supply for products by entering into partnerships with likes of Unilever, Procter & Gamble, L’Oreal, Kiko Milano, SheIn et al. This gives Bagallery competitive access to brands sought by its target demographic consumers.

“The beauty & personal care market in Pakistan is projected to have billions in revenues over the next five years. This represents a tremendous opportunity for market leaders like Bagallery, especially at a time where internet adoption in Pakistan has attained critical mass with more than 80 million active users,” said Faisal Aftab, managing partner of Lakson VC.

“Bagallery is in line with our core investment philosophy of supporting strong teams with a proven business model and potential to scale,” said Babar Lakhani, CEO of LI.

Regionally, exit prospects of beauty & fashion e-commerce plays have reaped big returns for investors.

UAE-based Namshi.com was acquired by Emaar Malls PJSC (Noon.com) in 2017 for $280 million. Myntra in India, one of the early players in this space, was acquired by Flipkart in 2014 for $300 million. Similarly, Nykaa in India was valued at $723 million in 2019, raising $14 million from TPG Growth.

Faisal Aftab and Babar Lakhani have also joined Bagallery’s Board of Directors.

Year of Investment: 2020

Headquarters: Islamabad, Pakistan

Website Link: https://roomy.pk

Islamabad-headquartered hospitality startup Roomy has raised $1 million in a pre-Series A round led by Lakson Venture Capital with the participation of Pakistan-focused Karavan VC and a syndicate of angel investors. The investment was announced at an online startup conference 021 Disrupt earlier today.

Roomy was started in 2018 by Dr. Asad Samar, a former investment banker who previously worked with Goldman Sachs and different other firms in the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates, to shake things up in the hospitality sector of Pakistan. The leadership team includes Haasin bin Zahid who was previously with Rocket Internet’s travel startup Jovago and Abdul Rehman who previously worked at Convo and Telenor.

The startup partners with unbranded hotel owners by helping them renovate their properties and then take them over to offer rooms to customers through its online platform. Roomy takes care of management, operations, and marketing of the property, sharing revenue with the landlords.

Many would think that Roomy is building something similar to Oyo but that’s not what it’s doing. Oyo does not manage the properties itself. They’re managed by the hotel owners with Oyo offering training and different types of resources for the stakeholders including to staff to help them run better.

Dr. Asad Samar, in a conversation with MENAbytes explained that their partner landlords have seen their income grow by 1.5 to 2.5X after Roomy taking over their properties. But it’s not just the income. The value of the properties also grows several folds as a result of this.

For travelers, the valuation proposition is simple: guaranteed online bookings, contactless check-in & check-out (no front desk queuing), standardized rooms, and branded amenities. These are the things that are usually expected from the top-tier hotels in the country only which cost between $100 to $150 on average for a night. Roomy’s prices start from about $40 per night.

In a statement, Dr. Asad said, “Roomy is a fresh take on the traditional hospitality business. Our rooms are decked out with aesthetically pleasing minimalist interiors, price points tailored for the young and growing Pakistani middle class, tech-stack developed in-house for the smart traveler and an innovative business model designed for scale.”

He had started Roomy with two rooms in a guest house and has now grown the network to have 5 properties with over 200 rooms in four cities across Pakistan, with a team of 100 employees. Its properties include a mix of partner buildings and, pods and yurts set up by Roomy itself in the Northern Areas of Pakistan (which are known for their mountain ranges and are very popular among both local and international travelers). The properties, Dr. Asad has told MENAbytes, have an average occupancy rate of 70 percent.

They’ve recently signed up four more properties that will be made available for the travels within the next few weeks.

It is probably this early success of the model because of which the startup was able to close its round in almost no time during the pandemic (which has proven to be a hell for hospitality/travel startups).

Faisal Aftab, the Managing Partner of Lakson Venture Capital, said, “The hospitality and travel industry in Pakistan is an underserviced market segment with a multi-billion-dollar market opportunity. Roomy is our second pick in the travel vertical as it has a scalable asset-light business model; while addressing the market gap for younger domestic leisure and corporate budget travelers, offering optimally priced standardized rooms & amenities in key locations.”

Roomy plans to use the investment to acquire more properties, grow its team, and increase its marketing spend.