The logistics startup that solved payments first

Growing up in Karachi’s turbulent nineties

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming Muhammad Hassan Khan — co-founder and CEO of TRAX — and immediately noticing the tech products pinned to his sleeves. Hassan explains they are in-house builds: Bolt, a rider fleet management app on Android, and a warehousing and delivery management system. “We love to wear them, flaunt them,” he says. It is a small detail that sets the tone for everything that follows — a founder who is genuinely proud of what his team has built.

Hassan was born in 1993 in Karachi, the eldest child in a middle-class family. His father was an engineer, the household moved between joint-family apartments and shared rooms, and school meant long van rides to Hamdard Public School — a large campus on the outskirts of the city whose football stadium had been inaugurated by Benazir Bhutto when Bilawal was still a child.

Growing up in Karachi in the nineties meant growing up inside a city that was frequently at war with itself. Hassan does not romanticise it. At thirteen, walking through Gulshan, he saw a man shot in front of him. Later, during university, a close friend’s father was killed at his own showroom. When Muzamil asks whether he ever sought therapy, Hassan is direct: “Seeking help or going for therapy is a taboo.” He believes his friend never fully recovered, and that the city’s relentless pace — its survival-of-the-fittest energy — became the coping mechanism for most people around him.

Convincing a middle-class father that business school was a real degree

Hassan’s father expected him to follow the family script: engineering at NED, the same university the father had attended. The pivot began in the ninth grade, when a tuition teacher who had studied at a business school suggested Hassan might be better suited to commerce. His father’s response was pragmatic — study engineering first, do business on the side.

What changed the conversation was a failed event management company. Hassan and a cousin launched it during intermediate, timed it badly against a FIFA World Cup final, and sold fewer than ten percent of their tickets. The company folded on opening night. But the attempt mattered. “If you can’t convince your parents and your peers,” Hassan tells Muzamil, “how will you ever be able to convince investors or people to join you?”

He applied to IBA’s newly launched BBA in Entrepreneurship — affiliated with Babson College in Boston, the first degree programme of its kind in Pakistan — and applied nowhere else. He got in. His father, who had been told the entrance test was so difficult that failure was the likely outcome, let him go.

Four months at Babson that outweighed four years at IBA

During his third year, Hassan was one of two IBA students selected for a one-way exchange at Babson. He is careful to say this on record: “Those three or four months at Babson — it was better than my entire undergrad and postgrad which I eventually did from IBA.”

The difference was not prestige. It was depth and discipline. Babson’s entrepreneurial marketing course put more mathematics into pricing strategy than Hassan encountered across multiple IBA finance courses. Faculty members were themselves entrepreneurs. Case studies connected directly to real decisions. Guest speakers were practitioners. “They would make learning very interesting and connected back to whatever you are learning,” he says. “If you are doing a course on organizational culture and you have never been in an organization, how would that content make sense to you?”

He came back from Boston having used Uber for the first time — one-third the price of a taxi, booked from a phone. Pakistan had no 3G yet. “You can’t compete with that,” he tells Muzamil. “You go to Pakistan from outside and every month you’ve gone ten years forward and then you come back.”

Stallion Deliveries: the first company, the wrong exit

Back at IBA, Hassan and a batchmate set up a desk at the university’s incubation centre and launched Stallion Deliveries in 2014. The insight was not about speed or coverage. It was about cash flow.

Legacy courier companies were holding e-commerce sellers’ cash for thirty days. A seller moving twenty products a day at two thousand rupees each was waiting a month to see six hundred thousand rupees. Hassan suspected the companies were earning float on that money. “Nobody saw it as a problem,” he says. “I was lucky enough that I saw it as a problem.”

Stallion’s pitch was simple: twenty-four-hour cash return. They picked up a parcel from Kurtuba Market in Hyderabad, delivered it, and deposited the cash the same day. The merchant called it magic. Word spread. Within nine months they were doing thirty to forty orders a day with a ten-rider team, serving clients including Sanaullah, a well-known Karachi store whose director called Hassan personally to say the company’s cash flow had transformed — but that they needed Stallion to open other cities.

That pressure to scale, combined with the absence of any angel investor ecosystem in 2014, led Hassan to sell the company to a large media group. He was still in his seventh semester. The acquisition price, he says with visible discomfort, was roughly half the value of a used Suzuki Alto. “I can’t tell you — the embarrassment.” The media group hired him to run the company, which grew to sixty cities and six hundred orders a day on the back of the group’s existing office network. But within a year, a vision clash emerged. Hassan exited in 2016.

Building TRAX: tech first, unit economics from day one

After leaving Stallion, Hassan met Sadabudullah, who was running an online grocery platform within his family’s distribution business. IBL — the conglomerate behind Habib, Dunkin, and a large pharma and distribution operation — had the infrastructure. Hassan had the execution blueprint. TRAX launched in 2017 with pre-seed funding of close to a million dollars, two hundred and fifty destination coverage from day one, and a deliberate decision to delay launch by three months until the delivery portal was actually built.

“Last time I learned the trade the hard way,” Hassan tells Muzamil. “This time it had to be a tech-first logistics company.” The company reached cash-flow positive in mid-2019, roughly two and a half years after launch, in line with the original plan. From that point, investors stopped putting money in and all generated cash went back into the business.

By the time of this conversation, TRAX is doing a million shipments a month, has two thousand employees, covers seven hundred destinations, and recorded a hundred million dollars in GMV and ten million dollars in income in the previous year.

The machine-learning blacklist and the fintech play

Later in the discussion, Muzamil pushes Hassan on what TRAX actually does with the return and delivery data it accumulates across millions of transactions. The answer reveals how far the company has moved beyond pure logistics.

TRAX built a machine-learning tool that assigns customers a colour-coded risk score based on their return history. A customer who returns more than sixty percent of orders is blacklisted. Between forty and sixty percent is flagged red. Below forty is green. When a merchant books a shipment, a notification surfaces automatically — no action required, the merchant decides what to do with it. “Some hold the order, some take half advance, some ignore it entirely,” Hassan explains. “We are an enabler. We are a platform.”

Muzamil points out the obvious extension: that same unique identifier — a mobile number tied to years of delivery behaviour — is exactly what fintech lenders need to build credit scores. Hassan agrees, and announces that TRAX is partnering with a fintech called Switch to launch payment links that will allow customers to pay by card, bank app, EasyPaisa, or JazzCash at the moment of delivery, before the rider hands over the parcel. “We want to be Pakistan’s first logistics company to convert cash on delivery into completely cashless delivery,” he says.

The COD-to-prepayment ratio in Pakistan is still roughly ninety-five to five. Hassan’s argument is that the psyche of the market — touch and feel before paying — will not change at checkout, but will change at the doorstep. “Once the parcel is at your doorstep, you would be very much willing to pay through your credit card.”

The Khaadi omni-channel moment and the question of quick commerce

One of the most concrete stories in the conversation is how TRAX landed Khaadi, the fashion retailer Hassan had been chasing since his Stallion days. During COVID, Khaadi’s central Karachi warehouse was overwhelmed and its website crashed under the load of customers who could no longer visit stores. TRAX pitched omni-channel fulfilment: use the forty-plus retail stores sitting idle across the country as micro-warehouses, dispatching orders from the location closest to each customer. “The first time it happened in Pakistan, it happened with Khaadi,” Hassan says.

Muzamil raises the question of quick commerce — specifically whether players like PandaGo, with their sixty-minute delivery DNA, are beginning to encroach on TRAX’s territory. Hassan is measured. He notes that Chinese platforms largely gave up on Q-commerce, that Pakistan is not a fast-paced country by habit, and that TRAX itself ran a thirty-minute ice cream delivery pilot with Unilever’s Munchies venture before it shut down. His view is that quick commerce and standard e-commerce will coexist the way fast food and sit-down restaurants coexist — different price points, different customer appetites. “For a fashion brand, if your return rate is fifteen percent on two-day delivery, why not six hours? I’m not even saying sixty minutes. Because then your fifteen percent comes down to three percent.”

The $4 million raise and what comes next

By the end of the conversation, Hassan makes the announcement Muzamil had hinted at in the opening. TRAX has raised close to four million dollars from a syndicate that includes AmanaCap in the US (managing partner Aziz Hashim), TriCap Investments in the UAE (Sulaiman Surani), angel investor Omer Ismail — a Pakistani who heads Walmart-backed fintech One — serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur Janzeb Sharmani, and local firm P&O Capital.

The capital will go into fleet and infrastructure, a consumer-facing app that lets anyone call a rider from their phone without walking into a courier store, warehousing platform expansion, and — most importantly to Hassan — turning TRAX’s in-house tech products into SaaS tools that can be sold regionally and globally. “We want tracks to become a global platform that Pakistan is truly proud of.”

Muzamil asks the closing question he puts to every guest: how do you see Pakistan twenty-seven years from now? Hassan is honest about the moments of hopelessness — the political instability, the legal climate, the difficulty of running a business in these conditions. But he does not leave it there. “I feel there is immense potential in Pakistan and that potential is in its people. Hardworking people, living through difficult circumstances, keeping themselves happy somehow. I have a lot of hope from Allah.”