Why Ten15 Exists
I've never liked instant coffee. It always felt like a compromise: convenient, but never something you actually wanted to drink.
That frustration turned into an idea in the summer of 2025, during an internship at the State Bank of Pakistan on I.I. Chundrigar Road — Karachi's financial hub. I expected a business district that dense to have decent coffee nearby. It didn't. Most offices were running on the same bad instant coffee everyone already had sitting in their kitchen cabinet.
My first instinct was to open a café. But with my final year at IBA ahead of me, running a café around class timings just wasn't realistic. So I flipped the idea: instead of opening a place to get good coffee, why not build a genuinely good alternative to instant coffee that people could make themselves, anywhere?
That's how Ten15 started — and where the name comes from too: a proper coffee break that takes about ten to fifteen minutes, whenever you need one, without the wait a real cup usually demands.
We use freeze-dried coffee specifically because of how it's made. Freeze-drying preserves flavor and aroma far better than regular instant coffee, which is why Ten15 tastes noticeably closer to real café coffee — at a fraction of the cost and wait a café trip or delivery actually costs you.
Running a business was always somewhere in my future — it's a bit of a Memon thing, honestly, something that felt built into how I was raised rather than a decision I had to talk myself into. So once I graduated from IBA with an Economics degree, going full-time on Ten15 wasn't a hard call. It was the plan all along, just brought forward.
— Rabia Popatya, Founder
This exceeded expectations. Getting my daily caffeine kick, and it tastes almost like the one I brew from my Espresso machine back home!