Over the last 4 years Pakistan has seen a surge in the field of entrepreneurship, particularly startups. Invest2Innovate also known as i2i has been one of the first ones in the field of entrepreneurship to provide an accelerator program for the companies starting up in Pakistan.
Speaking to IDG Pakistan is Kalsoom Lakhani, founder and CEO of Invest2innovate about the startup ecosystem in Pakistan and their journey as a startup accelerator program. Invest2Innovate was launched in 2012, and so far according to Kalsoom they have their fourth class enrolled and they take on 5 companies per batch. “We try to provide as much as hands on support as possible and as of now in January we will have graduated 21 companies out of which 16 are still operational and so are companies are which have gone on in to raise investments but they have actually created over two hundred jobs in the country which i think it really economic development as well as the power of entrepreneurship in Pakistan.”
Reflecting back over the past 4 four years, Kalsoom said, “No one really talked about entrepreneurship in the way we are talking about it today and there weren’t any entrepreneurship programs and today I think we have so many other incubators and programs and competitions and other accelerators as most university now has incubators and what’s amazing to see is the business community is really supportive from a mentorship and investor perspective and to see that growth it’s pretty incredible and it’s really exciting to be a part of that.”
2016 for i2i
Kalsoom Lakhani seemed very excited for 2016, saying “2016 is actually going to be really exciting, obviously our accelerator is going to running but and on our consultant side we are really looking to productize our work and we are actually in the process of building a more investor related product they will hear next year that will really provide information and will really some of the core issues in the access to capital space here in Pakistan to fortunately supports more entrepreneurial startups in the future.”
