Nas­rat Khalid, Founder of Aseel, grew up in a refugee camp for Afghans in Pak­istan. Before cre­at­ing the Aseel plat­form, Nas­rat served the inter­na­tion­al devel­op­ment sec­tor with the World Bank, USAID, and the pri­vate sec­tor for 12 years. Nas­rat Khalid start­ed the Aseel plat­form in 2017 to pro­mote Afghan art. The plat­form sup­port­ed local arti­sans in Afghanistan. The team has enabled more than 400 artists to sell their hand­made pot­tery, embroi­dery and jew­el­ry to peo­ple around the world.

Hav­ing grown up as a refugee in Pak­istan, Khalid had always want­ed to use his self-taught cod­ing and tech­nol­o­gy skills to help peo­ple in his coun­try. Since the Tal­iban took con­trol of the coun­try in August, how­ev­er, the com­pa­ny has switched focus to allow its glob­al cus­tomers to buy food and med­i­cine for Afghans. Watch­ing this cri­sis unfold in his coun­try from afar in Lon­don, Aseel founder Nas­rat Khalid knew it couldn’t be busi­ness as usu­al.

Since then Aseel has sup­port­ed 77,700 Fam­i­lies (544,000 Indi­vid­u­als) with sup­port pack­ages (food, wood, first aid, baby care and child relief pack­ages) in 34 cities across Afghanistan and Turkey. Aseel joined the PHINEO Star­tups Accel­er­a­tor to inter­na­tion­al­ize its offer­ing and also enable Euro­pean cus­tomers to finance aid pack­ages. In our pro­gram, we have matched the founders of Aseel with a men­tor spe­cial­ized in how to expand oper­a­tions to Ger­many and oth­er mar­kets. In the coach­ing ses­sion we focussed on their impact strat­e­gy and sup­port­ed them in their mar­ket­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tion efforts. Right now, Aseel is in a $1.2m bridge round (Jun-Jul ’24) and will start a $6m invest­ment round in Jan ’25, where we will sup­port them with con­nec­tion to investors.

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Nas­rat Khalid

Foud­er & CEO at Aseel Read more

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