Pakistan’s Maqsad raised the nation’s largest funding round by an education technology provider, showing that some startups in the nascent market are attracting investors despite a global venture financing slump.

Pakistan’s banks face a chicken-and-egg problem when it comes to lending money to their customers. They lack the data on customers’ credit histories that they need in order to decide whether to lend; but until they start lending, they won’t amass any of that data. Enter AdalFi, a Lahore-based fintech, which has developed a technology-driven solution to help break the logjam.

Despite the challenges presented to the venture capital industry and the start-up ecosystem over the past year, startups in Pakistan recorded a 17% year-on-year increase in total venture…