Where are they now? We track down 7 startups from Pakistan’s Plan9 incubator

Imran Haider is a blogger and curator of Pak Startup Weekly, a newsletter for the startup community in Pakistan. He tweets at @imrnhdr.

Plan9, Pakistan’s first technology incubator, recently celebrated its one-year anniversary. What started as Umar Saif’s idea is now becoming a leader in building up the startup ecosystem in the country.

From the outset many people thought Plan9 was just another government project, likely to vanish into the night. But the Plan9 team stuck to their plan – to help Pakistani startups grow their businesses and making an impact on the global marketplace. That’s why expectations from startups during the incubation are set and certain milestones must be reached in order to graduate from the incubator.

Its first two batches of young tech companies – a total of 20 startups – have successfully graduated and now Plan9 is incubating its third cycle. I was curious to know how some of the first batch had progressed – where are they now, and how’s life after Plan9? I caught up with seven of them to find out more.

1. Eyedeus

Ali Rehan and his partners started working on computer vision technologies for smartphones during their college days.

A lot has happened for Eyedeus since the team graduated from Plan9. They launched their first app, Groopic, which makes it easy to take group photos that include the person behind the camera. The app combines two snapped photos seamlessly so that everyone appears in the resultant photo.

Groopic is targeted at the US market and costs $1.99 on iPhone. After first being previewed on Tech in Asia, the buzz around the app built up to the point it was featured on CNN and declared the Gizmodo App of the day. This media coverage resulted in making Groopic the top paid app in three countries’ App Stores and the top photo and video app in 24 different countries. The team tells us that the app has been downloaded 150,000 times so far.

2. Hometown

Hometown is a specialist e-store that makes and sells high quality, handmade leather shoes. The company was founded by Waqas Ali and Sidra Qasim, who got inspired by the work of craftsmen in their hometown. They left their universities and went on to build a startup showcasing the amazing work of these craftsmen for a global market. (Editor’s note: Disclosure: Waqas Ali wrote for Tech in Asia before leaving for pastures new).

Apart from selling shoes, Waqas and Sidra aim to get into the online fashion industry, one step at a time. Hometown also opened a shop on Fab.com, and recently revamped the e-store website.

3. Rocxial, which turned into KickStoro

4. Valorsoft

5. Peer Cloud, which turned into Keep Truckin

6. Hybrid Signals

7. Go Ghoom

Show me the money