South Asia Investor Review

Ilyas Khan, the British Pakistan founder of Quantinuum, became a billionaire in the company’s IPO on NASDAQ last week. Khan is a pioneer in the revolutionary field of quantum computing which could speed up computing by orders of magnitude. It will have a huge impact in AI and encryption.  Dr. Irfan Siddiqui , a Pakistani-American professor of Physics at University of California at Berkeley, is another top expert in quantum computing.  Ilyas Khan, British Pakistani Founder of Quantinuum. Source: 2023 BLOOMBERG FINANCE LP Quantinuum raised $1.68 billion in an initial public offering last week, making its founder Illyas Khan a billionaire, according to  Forbes . The listing, which is the largest to date for a quantum startup, valued Quantinuum at over $15.6 billion after it sold 28 million shares at $60 each on June 3. Its shares opened at $58 per share on June 9. Khan, who owns around 15% of the company, is now worth $2.2 billion. Quantinuum uses a new type of quantum ...

There are ten Pakistani immigrants included among founders or co-founders of unicorns in America, according to  a recent study by the National Foundation for American Policy ( NFAP ). A unicorn is a startup with a valuation of at least one billion U.S. dollars. Immigrant entrepreneurs of US unicorns are diverse, hailing from 76 different countries. India, with 96 companies, is the leading country of origin for the immigrant founders of U.S. billion-dollar companies. Immigrants from Israel founded the second-most billion-dollar companies with 60, followed by the United Kingdom (47), China (41), Canada (30), Russia (23), France (21), Germany (18), Ukraine (16), Australia (14), Pakistan (10) and Romania (10). Some companies were founded by entrepreneurs from the same country or immigrants from multiple countries. Four of Ten Pakistani-American Founders Listed Among Unicorns Why are Indian entrepreneurs leading the pack of unicorn founders/co-founders in America?  The key reason i...

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...

Pakistan Air Force (PAF) pilots flying Chinese-made J10C fighter jets shot down at least two Indian Air Force's French-made Rafale jets in history's largest ever aerial battle involving over 100 combat aircraft on both sides, according to multiple media reports. India had 72 warplanes on the attack and Pakistan responded with 42 of its own, according to Pakistani military. The Indian government has not yet acknowledged its losses but senior French and US intelligence officials have  confirmed  that at least one Indian Rafale jet was shot down by Pakistan on May 7, 2025. Reports of  more Rafale downings are being investigated by western intelligence officials. This marks the first time that the sophisticated French-made warplane has been lost in combat. Rafale is the most advanced French 4.5 generation fighter plane. Indian Prime Minister Narendra spoke about India's need for Rafale back in 2019 after the last IAF-PAF dogfight and said: "We (Indians) acutely felt the ...

A Pakistani astronaut is scheduled to be the first non-Chinese person to go to Tiangong, the Chinese Space Station, according to media reports. Last year, China put a Pakistani satellite ICUBE-Q aboard its historic Chiang’e 6 mission into the moon’s orbit, designed to retrieve samples from the little explored far side of the moon. Weeks later, Beijing put another Pakistani communication satellite into orbit. The two sides have also announced that China’s Chang’e 8 moon lander mission in 2028 will carry a Pakistani rover to explore the moon's surface.  Space science is a lot more than rocket science. It goes well beyond building booster rockets for satellite launches. It includes various fields like physics, astronomy, biology, chemistry, and engineering to study phenomena in space and collect and analyze data about activities on earth.  Pakistan-China space cooperation is yet another confirmation of the close and growing scientific ties between the two countries. Tens of...

Generative  artificial intelligence  (GenAI) has taken the world by a storm. It has drawn the attention of academia, businesses and governments around the world.  This technology is expected to transform almost every sector from business and commerce to government, industries and defense. Are Pakistanis aware of its potential?  Is Pakistan getting ready for what is being described as the "AI Revolution"? Let's examine the answers to these questions.  AI awareness is rising among Pakistan’s general public. The country ranks third with 76% of people being aware of ChatGPT, according to Stanford University’s  AI Index Report 2024  covering a survey of 31 countries, including the United States, Europe and East Asia.  India (82%), Kenya (81%), Indonesia (76%), and Pakistan (76%) have the highest awareness rates in the world.  Brazil and Canada have 64% awareness, UK and Japan 61%, China, Germany and France 60% and the US 55%. Poland reported the l...

Independent candidates backed by the Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf (PTI) party emerged as the largest single block with 93 seats in the nation's parliament in the general elections held on February 8, 2024.  This feat was accomplished in spite of huge obstacles thrown in front of the PTI's top leader  Imran Khan  and his party leaders and supporters by Pakistan's powerful military to prevent their victory.  Pakistan's Official Election Results 2024. Source: Aljazeera   Imran Khan and his top party leaders were thrown in jail on trumped up charges, his party was denied a unified electoral symbol of cricket bat, his supporters' rallies were banned, the mainstream media were prevented from carrying PTI leaders' speeches and the Internet was repeatedly blocked when the party held online events. So how did they succeed in spite of it? The answer lies in how skillfully the PTI activists used  technology  to get the party's messages out to the country's young elec...

Bollywood star Kajol has said at a recent event that Indian political leaders are uneducated. Though she did not name anyone, she is facing vicious attacks by Modi Bhakts, a label embraced by the staunch supporters of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Here's what she said, "Change especially in a country like India is slow. It’s very very slow because for one we are steeped in our tradition, steeped in our thought process and, of course, it has to be with tradition. You have political leaders who do not have educational system background. I’m sorry I’m going to go out and say that.”   “We are being ruled by leaders, so many of them, who do not have that viewpoint which I think education gives you”, she added.  Copies of Modi's Degrees. Source: BJP There have long been questions about the educational qualifications of Mr. Modi who has talked about his humble origins as  chaiwalla (tea seller)  . These questions have been stoked by contradictory assertions by M...

Responding candidly to a question in the Indian capital New Delhi,  OpenAI  CEO Sam Altman said: "The way this works is we're going to tell you, it's totally hopeless to compete with us on training foundation models you shouldn't try, and it's your job to like try anyway. And I believe both of those things. I think it is pretty hopeless." This occurred at an event organized by The Economic Times where Altman answered a question by Rajan Anandan, a former Vice President of Google in India and South East Asia and current venture capitalist.   OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in India Altman in Delhi:  Sam Altman, the young CEO of OpenAI, the company that recently launched its revolutionary Generative AI app ChatGPT, was in India as part of a six-nation tour to discuss AI regulation.  ChatGPT has been trained on massive amounts of data and text from the internet, textbooks, newspapers, magazines and academic journals. It can write computer code and carry on sophisticated...

Pakistan's  nuclear weapons  program gets a lot of global attention. But the country also has a large and growing civil nuclear program which has added over 3,500 MW of low-carbon electricity to the national grid. It also supports a variety of agricultural, biological and medical applications. The program relies  particularly on the expertise and contributions of nuclear scientists trained at the Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology (PINSTECH) founded in 1965 by Dr. Ishrat Husain Usmani.  Dr. Usmani graduated from Aligarh Muslim University and later did his doctoral research at London's Imperial College under the supervision of Nobel Laureate Niels Bohr. The entire civilian nuclear program in Pakistan operates under the International Atomic Energy Agency's safeguards. PINSTECH, Pakistan Pakistan Nuclear Science and Technology History:    Pakistan started its nuclear program in the 1950s under the United States’ “Atoms for Peace” program, whi...