Pakistani fintech Oraan has secured a new investment from Epic Angels, the world’s largest all-female investor collective, with WaveMaker and i2i Ventures also returning to the cap table. The funds will go toward growing Oraan’s gold savings product, building out its gold inventory, and supporting the company’s expansion into new markets through technology licensing. The announcement, made on July 27, 2026, marks Epic Angels’ second bet on Oraan, having first backed the startup in 2021. That it’s doubling down five years later says a lot, both about how far Oraan has come and about what’s still possible in a market where the majority of women have historically had no meaningful relationship with the formal financial system. The Problem Oraan Set Out to Solve The story starts in 2017, when Halima Iqbal returned to Pakistan after a decade working as an investment banker in Canada. Despite her professional background, she struggled to open a basic bank account. It took her three and a half months. That experience became the foundation of Oraan, which she co-founded in 2018 with Farwah Tapal, a product designer who had recently returned from Spain. The name itself comes from the Urdu word for flight. The numbers behind the problem they were trying to solve are staggering. Pakistan is home to the third largest unbanked population in the world, with 115 million adults outside the formal financial system. Only 2% of women have access to credit. At the time Oraan was founded, women’s financial inclusion stood at just 4%. What Iqbal noticed, though, was that the problem wasn’t that Pakistani women didn’t understand money or didn’t save. It was that the financial system was not designed for how they already operated. An estimated 60 million Pakistani women were actively participating in informal savings circles called committees, or ROSCAs (Rotating Savings and Credit Associations), pooling money each month and taking turns receiving the full amount. Billions of dollars were moving through these networks every year, entirely outside any formal institution. The insight was simple but powerful. Rather than trying to replace a system women already trusted with something unfamiliar, why not digitize the system they were already using? What Oraan Built Oraan’s core product, the digital committee, mirrors exactly how informal savings circles work. Women pool money monthly and take turns receiving the full amount, giving each member access to a lump sum without requiring a credit history, a formal bank relationship, or collateral. The trust is built into the community structure itself, not into an algorithm assessing creditworthiness. By 2021, when Epic Angels first invested, Oraan had grown to a community of over 10,000 savers across more than 170 cities, with 84% of users being women. That year it raised $3 million in seed funding co-led by Zayn Capital and WaveMaker Partners, with participation from Resolution Ventures, i2i Ventures, Hustle Fund, Haitou Global, Plug and Play, and notable angel investors. The round made Iqbal and Tapal the first women entrepreneurs in Pakistan’s fintech space to raise a seed round. The company has since raised a total of approximately $4.3 million across multiple rounds, steadily building its user base and product suite. In November 2025, Oraan launched a gold savings product that lets users buy fractional gold with price-locked monthly instalments. In seven months, it has grown nearly 75-fold. That kind of growth rate doesn’t happen because of clever marketing. It happens because the product solves a real problem women already understood: gold has always been how Pakistani women store and transfer wealth, particularly in communities where formal banking is inaccessible or distrusted. Oraan made it digital, fractional, and accessible without requiring a lump sum. The third piece of Oraan’s strategy is international licensing. The company has signed a deal to license its savings and credit platform to a bank in the region, taking its model to millions of customers in a new market without the capital requirements of building operations from scratch. The licensing model suggests Oraan is positioning its technology as infrastructure, not just a standalone consumer app. Why This Funding Round Matters “Women in Pakistan were never waiting for financial products,” Iqbal said in the announcement. “They were waiting for the financial system to catch up to how they already save.” That framing is important because it reflects a fundamentally different approach from most fintech startups. Oraan didn’t build a product and then look for users. It observed an existing behavior trusted by tens of millions of women and built technology around it. The result is a product with stickiness that few consumer fintechs can replicate. When the financial tool you’re using is also your savings circle with friends, family me
