Our Founders' Story
From crop surveys in Punjab to Pakistan's leading agricultural market platform.
Ghasharib Shoukat
Founder - CEO
My journey began in the winter of 2021 while surveying crops across Punjab and Sindh for PAR' Crop Surveys, where I saw firsthand how a lack of fair price discovery kept farmers trapped in cycles of debt.
To solve this, I took my vision to the National Incubation Center Faisalabad. There I founded Zarai Mandi with my brother Abdul Raafey in 2022. We hit the ground, expanding our operations from a few grain markets to now represent over 160 different markets (mandis) across Pakistan. We now also cover fruits, vegetables, livestock and agriculture inputs like fertilizers.
I drove our technical pivot from chatbots to an automated API to ensure precise, real-time pricing data reaches everyone directly. In 2025, we launched our mobile application, and without marketing we have over 1,500 app registrations and steady revenue growth, our stable vision to create a comprehensive agricultural trading marketplace for all of Pakistan is on the way.
My journey in essence has only merely just begun, and the future and success of Pakistan's agricultural markets is directly tied to Zarai Mandi's journey itself. With the population growing and expected to cross 350 million by 2050, continued and sustainable agricultural output with increased yields and productions can only be tied to profitability — something that has been hidden and opaque in the agri supply-chain.
Zarai Mandi seeks to open those doors for anyone in Pakistan to leverage the power of data to achieve their goals and attain success. The only way from here is upwards and onwards, there's no time to look back given the stakes at hand.
Abdul Raafey Shoukat
Co-Founder - COO
My journey began in the winter of 2022, when I returned from my studies in the US to a simple but stubborn problem: Pakistan's agri-markets — the ghallah mandis that move the country's grains, produce, and livestock — had no reliable, real-time price data.
Farmers, traders, and mills were all operating on unverified information, rumor and word-of-mouth in markets worth billions.
By then, my co-founder Ghasharib Shoukat had already incubated Zarai Mandi at the National Incubation Center in Faisalabad. We had reps in just three markets — Sahiwal, Arifwala, and Okara — and a mission: build a physical network of data reporters across Pakistan's large and medium scale agri-markets.
We spent the following months touring mandis across Sindh and Punjab, hiring auctioneers and local social media influencers already embedded in the agri-space to serve as our reps. Data collection started simply, over WhatsApp, before we built our own forms to standardize it. From there, we launched a WhatsApp community to deliver rates directly to farmers, traders, and other interested buyers and sellers.
We gave this information away for free at first, using that period to gather vital feedback and prove the concept was working. Once we saw measurable demand, we converted the free service into a paid WhatsApp community with dedicated groups for each commodity while I focused on refining the rep-hiring system and training our product team to scale it. We backed the service with our first Meta ad campaign, and from there, steadily refined every process, growing the team and teaching them our procedures as we went.
Today, Zarai Mandi has served close to 3,000 customers B2B and B2C, locally and internationally. The achievement we're proudest of: for the past year, our price data has been used by the Pakistan Mercantile Exchange (PMEX) to help settle thousands of tonnes of commodities daily with zero claims.
We now provide price data across eight agri-verticals — grains, vegetables, fruits, agri-inputs, livestock, herbals, dry fruits, and kiryana items covering numerous products and hundreds of by-products, gathered by reps in 150 locations spanning markets, mills, dealers, wholesalers, and importers/exporters across the country.
Our goal is to become the #1 platform for price discovery and commodity trading in Pakistan — the kind of category-defining platform InDrive and Foodpanda became in their own industries. This is just the foundation.
