"200M People & Zero Unicorns" – so reads a title of one article about Pakistan's startup scene. It very much summarizes one of the hopes of our episode's guest – Ambareen Baig, Insights Lead at Invest2Innovate, a 3-arm Pakistani Accelerator, Venture Fund and Insights Lab.
We talked with Ambareen over Zoom in a live mode in August; video verison of this episode is available on SCOLAR Academy YouTube channel.
But these two data points omit something very important in between: a booming tech scene, that has seen a rapid growth in the last decade. With Ambareen, we have made a virtual data-rich deep dive into the key dynamics within the young, yet promising innovation ecosystem of the South Asian nation.
Ambareen gave us multiple curious data points to paint a detailed picture of startup activities and venture capital flows in Pakistan over the last 5 years - such as, for instance, how international and local VCs investments differ value- and deal quantity-wise; where female entrepreneurs tend to find source of financing for their projects; and which sectors rose the most against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic.
From: "Covid-19 & Startups in Pakistan: Pivots, Partnerships & Future Positioning", an article by Ambareen @ MENAbytes.
A lot of the mentioned data comes from the Deal Flow Tracker, an adjustable database of traceable investments into Pakistan's startups between 2015-2020. Not only is it an exceptionally useful tool for anyone doing research about the trends in international & local investments into Pakistani startups; there are also several other value-added variables to compare the data, including the gender of each startup founder, startups' operating status, sector, amounts of financing raised, and a couple more.
Insights Arm under Ambareen's lead is on the respectable mission of facilitating VCs and individuals' – both from Pakistan & beyond – understanding of the country's innovation ecosystem with insightful research of various sectors from grocery delivery to edtech. Be sure to check i2i website to cover the whole range of their materials!
Thank you again Ambareen for talking to us; we'll definitely keep revisiting Pakistan's innovation market from different angles – stay tuned for the upcoming episodes!