Shadiyana, a Pakistan-based wedding technology startup, has raised $800,000 in pre-seed funding from Indus Valley Capital (IVC) to build its product and bring structure to the country’s Rs900 billion (USD 3.21 billion) wedding industry.
Backed by IVC with close to $1 million in funding, over 500,000 users, 600 vendors, and 30,000 weddings planned, Shadiyana is expanding its reach beyond Islamabad into Lahore and Karachi, read a statement on Monday.
“We get a rush from every new booking,” says Neelam Shoaib, Co-Founder and COO of Shadiyana. “That passion is exactly what’s fueling the Shadiyana Wedding Planner App — built to transform Pakistan’s grand yet inefficient wedding ecosystem into something seamless, smart, and truly ubiquitous.”
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For Neelam, the need for change first surfaced years earlier after she came down with a fever at her sister’s wedding. That moment revealed how exhausting weddings can be, even when families spend a fortune.
Years later, when she and Co-Founder Izzah Zaman began discussing what they wanted to build, the wedding industry became the obvious sweet spot.
“Coming from working-class backgrounds, the obvious path was to choose stable jobs and enjoy weekends,” Zaman recalls. “But we loved building things and losing ourselves in that process.”
Talking to Business Recorder, Zaman said that being women founders and industry outsiders has actually “worked to our advantage”.
“It has made us extremely grounded and disciplined in our decision-making,” she said. “We question everything from first principles—Is this the best way? Is this the best use of our limited resources? That mindset shaped our operational efficiency from day one”.
Izzah noted that being industry outsiders has allowed the company to come in without the baggage of “this is how weddings work” and generate solutions from scratch.
“That combination—resource discipline and first-principles problem-solving—has been central to how we’ve built the product and engaged with the ecosystem,” she said.
When questioned about how the startup managed to convince IVC, Zaman shared that the fund “invested in Shadiyana because we’re bringing transparency and simplicity” to the wedding industry.
The startup, however, refrained from disclosing revenue figures at this stage. “As we grow, we’ll share more performance metrics in future announcements,” she said.
As part of its growth, Shadiyana has launched its wedding planner app, a first-of-its-kind end-to-end app that lets couples discover, book, and manage vendors from anywhere, with real-time access to resources and planning tools.
“Shadiyana is bringing order, transparency and trust to one of Pakistan’s largest but most underserved industries,” said Aatif Awan, Managing Partner at Indus Valley Capital.
“Their customer obsession and founder market fit make them exactly the kind of team we love to back at Indus Valley Capital. We’re excited to partner with Shadiyana in building the country’s leading wedding platform.”
Shadiyana believes that with a market valued in the billions and millions of weddings celebrated annually, the company is positioned for its next phase of growth — expanding its vendor base across more cities, introducing more technology-driven planning tools, and strengthening its team.
