The Pakistan tech accelerator with a heart wants to help solve real problems

Imran Haider is the co-founder of Startup92 and curates the Pak Startup Weekly newsletter. He tweets at @ImrnHdr.

Kalsoom Lakhani, founder and CEO of Pakistan’s Invest2Innovate startup accelerator, believes that people tend to get more entrepreneurial when life gets tough. That’s why she sees Pakistan as a bright prospect in the startup world.

The same can also be said about other developing countries in the region, and that’s why Lakhani doesn’t see Invest2Innovate as simply a startup accelerator program – though that is how it started out.

“We are here to help the entire ecosystem of Pakistan grow,” Lakhani says. “The accelerator thing happened like an accident. I saw something where I thought I can contribute and off we go. But Invest2Innovate is here not just to help existing startups get some investment but also to help generate a pipeline of entrepreneurs and startups. And that’s very important. Because without a sufficient pipeline the system will not survive much longer.”

She adds that the program will extend to other developing nations like Bangladesh. “[That’s] our next target. In the next five years we will be in multiple countries.”

Before Invest2Innovate, Lakhani had a couple of jobs in the US. But she always wondered about her place on earth. She started philanthropic projects and traveled Afghanistan (update: In a correction, Iraq has been removed). In 2008, she started a social awareness blog called CHUP (Changing Up Pakistan) before establishing Invest2Innovate in 2011. “We bootstrapped for the major part in the early days before getting seed funding. We did a campaign on Indiegogo as well,” Lakhani explains to Tech in Asia.

Aiming at a civic impact

Invest2Innovate now has two revenue streams. One is consultancy work the team does for companies and organizations like the World Bank and Open Society, and the other is the three percent equity it takes in every startup that passes through the accelerator. The equity model is not very stable because most of the startups are not very profitable, so most of the income is from serving as a consultancy. Lakhani adds that the team selects those projects carefully. “We only choose projects that we believe will benefit the startup ecosystem by helping build a pipeline of startups for coming years.”

Kalsoom Lakhani is the accelerator’s founder and CEO

Most of the startups out of Invest2Innovate – which is sometimes referred to as i2i – are not as mass market as those from traditional accelerators. The majority of the young teams are building something with the aim of having a social impact.

“Call me a bit old fashioned, but I still love hard cover books over Kindle. Tech is good but I believe we should use it to solve basic problems that developing countries are facing right now. Perhaps this personal preference has translated into what i2i currently is,” enthuses Lakhani.

See: New report shines a light on Pakistan’s startup opportunities