Pakistan hosts world’s leading investors at the 021 Disrupt conference
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2025-02-18 05:59:40
KARACHI: Pakistan’s biggest entrepreneurship conference ‘021 Disrupt’ attracted top venture capital firms and tech celebrities from the Middle East, Singapore and the US. The two-Day conference was organized by The Nest I/O, a technology incubator set up by the Pakistan Software Houses Association (P@SHA).
P@SHA President Jehan Ara revealed that the two-day conference had a maximum attendance of 650 persons from over 200 start-ups, professionals, influencers and students who listened to 60 speakers, including 14 international speakers who were experts in their fields. All the workshops were overbooked, she said.
For the first time in Pakistan, an investor roundtable was held with more than 35 investors who shared insights and explored possibilities of investment and collaboration at various levels.
These international investors had previously invested in global household names such as Careem, Udemy, Behance, Canva and Stripe to name a few. Some of the leading international investors that participated in the conference included Bakery (part of The Abraaj Group),Wamda Capital, Golden Gate Ventures, Middle East Venture Partners, Oman Technology Fund & Wadi Accelerator, Sarmayacar and 500 other start-ups. Apart from international investors, sixteen institutional investors from Pakistan also attended in search for investable start-ups and to be a part of the discourse.
Hinting at the likely outcome, Jehan Ara said there may soon be an announcement of at least 2 to 5 major investments that were an outcome of these interactions, while talks were under way to set up a new start-up fund.
Of the two major investors, representatives of Wamda announced at the conference that the company was about to set aside $50 million for investment in Pakistan start-ups, to be spent over the next 4 years.
Another major Middle Eastern investor, MEVP, also expressed interest in investing in Pakistani start-ups, as did Bakery, which was the platinum sponsor of the conference.
Earlier, the conference speakers and panellists touched upon important topics like the need for consolidating the start-up ecosystem in Pakistan, engaging with the regulators to bring the framework up to speed with the changing needs, perception management of the country, and the need to become players in the global market by sharing experiences of successes and failures from markets as varied as the US, Chile, Middle East, Indonesia and Turkey.
It was also announced that 021Disrupt would not end as a one-off event but would be made a regular part of the calendar.
Published in Daily Times, November 6th 2017.
