The new company is targeting a global market with software built from Gul’s experience navigating the investor search at Airlift, as Pakistan’s startup funding market slowly recovers from its post boom downturn. 

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Usman Gul has built his second startup around a problem he spent years dealing with at his first. Metal, the AI company he founded in 2024, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding led by a16z Speedrun and Y Combinator, with the company developing software to help founders find suitable investors and manage the fundraising process. 

Metal's product grew out of Gul's experience at Airlift, where finding the right investors meant sorting through hundreds of potential backers. He says the team spoke to around 300 investors while raising approximately $120 million over three years, with about 80% ultimately not fitting the company's requirements around stage, sector, geography or funding needs. Its platform now uses AI to identify potential investors, research their investment patterns and manage fundraising relationships, with the product extending into investor relations and other operational work involved in raising a round. Airlift's experience gives the new company a direct origin story. The quick commerce startup raised $85 million in 2021, when international investors were pouring capital into fast growing technology companies across emerging markets. It shut down the following year after failing to secure the additional funding it needed, as a global venture pullback coincided with Pakistan's worsening economic conditions and tighter access to foreign capital. The collapse became one of the clearest examples of what happened when the funding environment shifted and startups built around rapid expansion could no longer rely on another large round. 

Pakistan's startup market has since operated under much tighter funding conditions. Capital has begun to pick up from its lows, with Pakistani startups raising more than $74 million across 16 deals in 2025 compared with $33.5 million across eight disclosed deals in 2024. Much of that increase came through hybrid financing rather than conventional equity, leaving the market well below the large venture rounds seen during the previous cycle. Metal is being built beyond that domestic funding cycle. Its customers can be founders anywhere in the world looking to raise capital, while its own investors include firms from the US, Pakistan and the Gulf. Metal says it has recorded six consecutive quarters of 30% to 80% quarter-on-quarter growth and is tracking toward multi-million dollar annual revenue in fiscal 2026. The company also says its paying customers have raised $542 million through the platform during the year and that more than 1,000 founders use Metal each year. 

A smaller software company built for a global market requires a different kind of financing from the consumer expansion that drove Airlift. Metal can sell the same core product across markets without having to build a physical operation in each one, while its focus on fundraising gives it a problem that exists wherever venture backed companies are being created. Gul is also approaching the business with a clearer view of how quickly access to capital can change, having experienced both the abundance of the previous cycle and the consequences when it disappeared. 

The $4.5 million gives Metal room to expand its product and customer base, with two major early-stage investors now behind the company. Its next challenge is turning a product that founders use during one of the most important moments in a company's life into something they continue to rely on throughout their relationship with investors. If Metal can make that transition, its software could become part of how startups manage their capital relationships long after a fundraising round has closed. 

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