National Incubation Center Lahore (NICL) at LUMS has onboarded illustrious Pakistani start-upfounders, inventors and investors to help accelerate innovation and entrepreneurship-led economicgrowth in Pakistan. The seven new Council members include four Pakistani women venturecapitalists and entrepreneurs with academic qualifications from MIT, Harvard and Stanford. NICL’sFoundation Council curates, inspires, mentors and monitors the progress of its Foundry programmethat culminates in successful launch of ventures.

“NICL’s revamped venture incubation model is rooted in discovery and innovation. Being an integralpart of LUMS, we are uniquely positioned to pioneer this model by fostering an intersection ofapplied research, industry and talent. Solving Pakistan’s biggest problems requires extraordinaryhuman capital development. We are fortunate that we are able to do so with the help of faculty atLUMS and our stellar Council members who embody our spirit of excellence, resilience andcharacter,” said Saleem Ahmad, Chairman NICL.

The new Council members include tech disruptor Dr. Wardah Inam, Founder and CEO of Overjet, adental AI-venture based in the US which recently raised $27MM from leading VCs. She previouslyworked at Q Bio, GE and Apple and received her PhD from MIT, where she developed AI-poweredmicrogrid technology, recognized by National Geographic as a breakthrough that could transformthe way we power the world. As a postdoctoral fellow at MIT Computer Science and ArtificialIntelligence Lab, she worked on remote biomedical sensing, using machine learning on wirelesssignals. Dr. Inam is the recipient of MIT Graduate Women of Excellence Award and will also bejoining NICL Advisory Board.

She is joined by Anna Khan, General Partner at Charles River Ventures (CRV), one of the oldestventure capital firms in the US where she focuses on enterprise software and has invested inStoryboard, Workstream, Cord, Figure, and Tribe. Prior to CRV, she spent five years at BessemerVenture Partners, investing across the software ecosystem. Ms. Khan is the Founder and CEO ofLaunch X, an accelerator that helps female founders learn how to raise capital for their businesses,and has been featured in Harvard Alumni Magazine and Bloomberg Business. An honours graduateof Stanford and with an MBA with distinction from Harvard, Ms. Khan was named as Forbes’ ‘30under 30’ and is also the author of several industry-leading papers on the cloud ecosystem.

Also joining is Sacha Haider, Principal at Global Ventures based in Dubai. She brings investmentexperience in MENA, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Asia, through her work as an investor atColony Capital in Mexico, Abraaj in Kenya and L Catterton in Singapore. She is a graduate ofUniversity of Warwick.

Halima Iqbal, Founder and CEO at Oraan, Pakistan's first women-led, women-first fintech, is also anew Council member. Formerly, she founded Mealsurfers, a food-tech start-up in Toronto where shealso worked as an investment banker with TD Securities. She is a graduate of University of Waterloo.The Council also welcomed Rabeel Warraich, Founder of Sarmayacar, a major Pakistani venturecapital fund. Mr. Warraich was formerly a Vice President at the Government of Singapore's privateequity firm, GIC Investment Management and an investment banker at Morgan Stanley based inLondon. He is a graduate of Economics from MIT and the University of Oxford.

Joining him is Omair Ansari, Co-Founder and CEO of Abhi, a Y-Combinator affiliated start-up that hasbuilt a Shariah-compliant salary advance platform aimed at digitising consumer credit in the country.

Previously, Mr. Ansari worked at Morgan Stanley as an investor focused on frontier and emergingmarkets based in New York. He is a graduate of McMaster University.

Salman Khalid is Founder of Chogori Ventures, an angel investors syndicate for Pakistan, andDirector of BNP Paribas in the M&A team for MENA. Previously, he worked at private equity fundsManara infrastructure Fund and Emerging Markets Partnerships in Bahrain and Washington D.C. Mr.Khalid was a Fulbright Scholar to Georgetown University, an MBA from LUMS and has an ElectricalEngineering degree from UET Lahore.

Speaking about recent developments at NICL, Dr. Arshad Ahmad, Vice Chancellor, LUMS recognizedNICL’s transformational journey over the past year, “Despite the challenges of the pandemic, thenew team continues to uplift the quality of the Center’s services with a laser-focus on impactingPakistan’s entrepreneurship talent. The calibre of recent appointments is a reflection of itsexceptional strengths and persistent focus on delivering results.”