South Asia Investor Review

While the Israeli weapons supplied by the "civilized" West are destroying the lives and limbs of thousands of Gaza's innocent children, a Pakistani  startup  is trying to provide them with free custom-made prostheses, according to media reports. The Karachi-based startup Bioniks was founded in 2016 and has sold prosthetics that use AI and 3D scanning for custom designs.  Gaza's Child Amputee Sidra Al Bordini with Bioniks CEO Anaz Niaz. Source: Instagram Bioniks has recently delivered its first prosthetics made for Gaza's children using remote imaging to design custom arms at low cost.  The demand for such prosthetics is high because, according to the United Nations, Gaza has 4500 new amputees since October 7, 2023 Hamas attack which triggered Israel's brutal response and started the ongoing  genocide  in Gaza.  A recent Reuters story cites the examples of two girls,  three-year-old Habebat Alla and 8 year-old Sidra Al Bordini, who recently receive...

Anysphere, founded in 2022 by Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, Aman Sanger and Michael Truell, has been approached by investors about a deal that would more than double its valuation in a new funding round to $18 to $20 billion, according to  Bloomberg .  Sualeh Asif , 25, the Chief Product Officer and co-founder, hails from Karachi, Pakistan.  He studied at Nixor College in Karachi before going to the United States in 2018. He met the other three co-founders while studying at the Massachusetts  Institute of Technology (MIT). One-half (Sualeh Asif and Aman Sanger) of the startup’s founding team is of South Asian origin. The company moved to  San Francisco  soon after its founding in 2022.  Sualeh Asif, Anyshphere Inc's Pakistani-American Founder Anysphere’s lead product is an AI code editor called Cursor AI.  It works as an AI assistant that writes code and also anticipates code developer's needs, identifies inefficiencies, and helps solve compl...

Our Next Energy (ONE), a two-year-old Michigan startup founded by Pakistani-American Mujeeb Ijaz, has received $25 million in initial investment from Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures and German automaker BMW. Storage battery technology is a key area of innovation to bring about  clean energy revolution .   Mujeeb Ijaz has engineered a way to achieve longer ranges for electric vehicles from lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) batteries, a more stable but less powerful chemistry than the nickel-based batteries currently used by most automakers. Mujeeb's brother  Mansoor Ijaz  made headlines in 2011 when he wrote a Financial Times Op Ed regarding his conversations with Husain Haqqani who was serving as Pakistan's ambassador in Washington. Mujeeb's father Mujaddid Ahmed Ijaz was a Pakistani experimental physicist and a professor of physics at Virginia Tech.   Mujeeb Ijaz, Founder CEO of Our Next Energy (ONE) Mujeeb Ijaz,  Pakistani-American  fou...

Luma Health, co-founded by Adnan Iqbal, a second generation Pakistani American , raised $130 million in series C funding. Adnan's fellow co-funders include Dr. Tashfeen Ekram, a Pakistani-American and Aditya Bansod, an Indian-American. The latest round has brought Luma's total funding to $160 million.  "I have had a life of privilege. I have been to the right institutions. I have played collegiate sports. I check all the boxes. But I have a recognizable Pakistani Muslim name. I would have raised twice the amount of money in half the time if I was a white guy. That's just the honest truth", he told an interviewer.  Luma Health Co-founders San Francisco-based Luma’s platform is designed to centralize and automate scheduling and communication with patients. The company’s tech integrates with more than 80 types of electronic health records (EHRs) across the healthcare IT stack. Luma has served more than 30 million patients across the U.S. and is used by more than 550...

Seed Labs, a Pakistani  financial technology  startup based in Karachi, has raised $6.5 million in seed funding to launch a derivatives trading platform. It was founded about a year ago by four young men in their mid-20s: Yameen Malik, Rabeel Jawaid, Zabi Mohebzada, and Ahmad Jawaid, according to Bloomberg reporter  Faseeh Mangi .  Seed Labs Founders Seed Labs's first app is designed for decentralized trading of derivatives on commodities, cryptocurrencies and stocks using blockchain technology.  Seed Labs  is backed by venture money from investors in 9 different countries, including institutional liquidity providers, Alameda Research, Kronos Research, LedgerPrime and others that collectively trade over $28 billions a day, the company said in a statement. The initial platform planned to launched later this year will primarily be a Perpetual Swap Trading Exchange. It will allow any trade pair from any asset class to be offered — from commodities, equities, d...

The Organization of Pakistani-American Entrepreneurs (OPEN) hosted a dinner on Wednesday Feb 20, 2019, for young tech entrepreneurs from Pakistan who came this year to  Silicon Valley  to attend StartUp Grind Global Conference. About 50 people, including 20 from Pakistan, attended the event. L to R: Shahjahan Chaudhry, Jahan Ara, Riaz Haq, Rehan Jalil StartUp Grind: StartUp Grind describes itself as a "global community of entrepreneurs connecting 1.5 million entrepreneurs in over 500 chapters". It has chapters in all major Pakistani cities.  StartUp Grind  organizes a global conference every year in Silicon Valley. Young Pakistani Entrepreneurs with Riaz Haq Pakistani participation in this conference is growing with 40 delegates this year, up from 24 last year. Arzish Azam, founder of Ejad Lab, organizes this annual pilgrimage of Pakistani techies to Silicon Valley every year under the banner of Pak-US Technology Exchange. Participants pay their own e...

San Francisco based Cloudcade has announced it will invest $6 million to set up a game development studio in Lahore, Pakistan, according to Venturebeat. The Lahore studio will be led by Ammar Zaeem, cofounder of Pakistan’s mobile game studio Caramel Tech which already has a team of 50 engineers. The move is a big investment into Pakistan as a tech hub, and it shows how the game business is expanding around the globe. Cloudcade:    Founded by Di Huang in 2013, Cloudcade is known for its popular multiplayer game "Shop Heroes" that pits players against each other in a competition to create the best shop they can. If a player can make a better store and perform more tasks than his or her rivals, he or she wins. The game is available on the Apple iOS App Store, Google Play, Samsung Galaxy Store, Amazon, Kongregate, and Facebook. It is now also supported on the Apple Watch. In his report, Venturebeat's Dean Takahashi says that "Pakistan’s emergence as a soft...