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Phaze Ventures, the Muscat-based venture firm, has made a strategic investment in Metal, an AI platform for founders raising venture rounds, founded by Usman Gul. Terms were not disclosed.
Metal brings investor discovery, relationship intelligence, outreach, pipeline management, meeting preparation and fundraising strategy into a single AI-native platform, pitched as a replacement for the spreadsheets, scattered research and uneven network access that founders typically rely on during a raise. As part of the deal, Phaze portfolio founders will receive 25% off Metal plans.
The company is backed by Y Combinator and a16z's speedrun programme, with other investors and partners including Indus Valley Capital, Rebel Fund and Techstars, the last of which has partnered with Metal to support founders across its portfolio. More than 100 YC founders have signed on as paying customers. Before Metal, Gul was part of the early teams at DoorDash and Marqeta.
Before Metal, Gul co-founded Airlift, the Pakistani startup that launched in 2019 as a mass-transit service before pivoting to instant grocery delivery during the pandemic; earlier, he was part of the early teams at DoorDash and Marqeta.
Airlift raised a $2.2 million seed in 2019 co-led by Fatima Gobi Ventures and Indus Valley Capital, then went on to raise $85 million in 2021 at a $275 million valuation, co-led by podcaster Harry Stebbings and Josh Buckley, the largest funding round in Pakistan's history and part of more than $120 million raised over three years.
The expansion that followed was rapid and short-lived. Airlift scaled into eight Pakistani cities and three in South Africa, then cut 31% of staff in a May 2022 "strategic realignment" and shut down permanently that July after investors pulled out of a fresh round, leaving around 300 corporate staff and thousands of warehouse and delivery workers jobless.
A subsequent account in Rest of World, drawing on interviews with more than 15 former employees, described inventory mismanagement, pricing inefficiencies and pilferage across its warehouse network, though Gul attributed the collapse to a failed fundraise amid the 2022 global funding crunch and maintained the company's operational metrics were strong.
Gul has framed Metal as the product of that experience, having raised over $120 million across multiple rounds for Airlift and built it, in his telling, to be the fundraising infrastructure he wished had existed at the time.
Phaze co-founder and CEO Abdullah Al-Shaksy called Metal "the product founders wish they had before starting a raise," and said Gul had "lived this problem deeply as a founder."
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