“Pakistan’s Tech Story in Three Chapters: TRG’s Unicorn Bet, the Steady Mastery of Systems Limited, and the Quiet Confidence of Gaditek”

Just 300 metres, a mere three minute walk from the gates of the White House, sits 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue. While the world’s attention was fixed on the political theatre unfolding at Washington D.C.’s most famous executive address, a quiet software company inside the neighbouring commercial complex was orchestrating a massive financial coup of its own. In October 2018, looking straight down at the presidential mansion from its corner suites, the low profile firm finalised a $130 million Series D funding round. With little public fanfare, the blockbuster deal instantly minted a new tech unicorn, catapulting the understated company to a staggering $1.6 billion valuation right in the heart of the American capital.

The company was called Afiniti. It used patented behavioural pairing algorithms that match incoming customers with specific contact centre agents based on predicted interaction outcomes.

Its founder, a Pakistani American named Zia Chishti, had earlier built the orthodontics company Align Technology and was no stranger to building unicorns even before they were described as such. Some quick history.

Zia’s Align vision. Pakistan as the engine room.

When Zia invented Invisalign and co founded Align Technology in 1997, his core strategy to keep costs down was offshoring the highly labour intensive 3D digital tooth modeling work, treating and plotting the micro movements of teeth, to Lahore, Pakistan. It was an operational masterstroke. It allowed Align to scale processing capabilities cheaply while keeping its high value sales, marketing and executive teams in California.

Align went public on the Nasdaq on 26 January 2001 at $13 per share, raising $130 million, opening at a market capitalisation of roughly $770 million and crossing the billion dollar mark soon after. Today it commands a market capitalisation of approximately $11.86 billion. Zia is named inventor on roughly 150 patents. His Pakistani contemporaries have effectively zero. That distinction is worth remembering.

The post 9/11 panic.

The breaking point for the Align board came after the September 11, 2001 attacks. US venture capitalists, led by firms like Kleiner Perkins, became highly risk averse regarding operational concentration in Pakistan due to immediate regional stability concerns. The board demanded a redundancy and diversification plan to move operations out of Pakistan to mitigate geopolitical risk. Align explicitly announced contingency plans to set up backup tooth modeling centres in Dubai and Costa Rica. Zia, with deep personal and cultural ties to Lahore, vehemently resisted completely abandoning or heavily diluting the Pakistani operation, viewing it as the crown jewel of the company’s cost structure.

But back to Afiniti. Pakistan had its first technology unicorn, and Zia his second, even if the country’s stock exchange barely noticed.

Six years later, Afiniti exited Bermuda provisional liquidation. A November 2024 Chapter 15 filing in Delaware listed approximately $522 million of secured debt against an enterprise value of $275 to 350 million dollars. The common equity, including the indirect stake held by Pakistani public investors through TRG Pakistan, was effectively written down. Because Zia had been ousted from the company he built, and those who thought they could run and scale the AI Crown Jewel lost the plot completely. Beyond structural and financial losses, Pakistani youth lost hundreds, if not thousands, of AI centric jobs just as AI was becoming mainstream.

This is the story Pakistan should be telling itself right now. Not as a cautionary tale, but as a case study in what almost worked, and why building the conditions for the next attempt is the country’s most important industrial policy question of the AI era.

Across the constellation of companies the Chishti complex built and acquired, including Afiniti, the Nasdaq listed contact centre operator ibex, the AIM listed Digital Globe Services (a pioneering online customer acquisition platform that went public in February 2013 at a £47.2 million market capitalisation and was later folded into ibex), and the Florida based e-TeleQuote insurance distributor, the group at its operational peak employed over 35,000 people across Pakistan, the Philippines, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Honduras, the United States, the United Kingdom and Senegal. ibex alone today employs roughly 33,000, with around 10,000 of those in Pakistan and 16,000 plus in the Philippines. By people working in it, Pakistani origin enterprise has never been larger.

Zia Chishti deserves open credit for these outsized bets. A true tech visionary and inventor, he co founded Align Technology, created Invisalign and took the company public at roughly a billion dollar valuation in 2001. He is named inventor on around 150 patents while his Pakistani contemporaries have effectively zero. The company he helped build now commands a market capitalisation north of $11.7 billion.

At TRG he made early, patient investments in applied AI. Afiniti seeded in 2005, long before the term was fashionable. He modernised BPO through ibex, and pursued customer acquisition technology through Digital Globe Services that counted the top ten US telcos as marquee customers. These were not conservative services plays. They were frontier swings that generated real IP, scaled employment across continents, and gave Pakistani public investors a genuine look through to unicorn scale potential.

Chishti’s foresight while steering the business was prescient. Afiniti’s behavioural AI targeted defensible moats rather than commoditised hours. The tragedy is what happened after his chairmanship ended in 2021. Under successor leadership, heavy secured debt, operational pressures, and the 2022 to 2023 rate shock culminated in the 2024 restructuring. What had been a $1.6 billion valuation mark collapsed, and common equity, including indirect stakes held by Pakistani investors via TRG Pakistan, was largely destroyed. ibex has faced its own valuation compression. This is concrete value destruction traceable to the post Chishti transition. Chishti had the right track. The execution continuity and capital structure that followed did not hold. The management team he led, on its own, was left rudderless and subsequently sold shares in ibex, further reducing outcomes for TRG Pakistan shareholders. Since those matters are sub judice, I will not focus on the corporate challenges.

In parallel, Asif Peer has been an outstanding steward of Systems Limited, rising through the ranks to lead the country’s most valuable listed technology company. Where Zia invented new categories, Asif perfected operational excellence at scale, tripling headcount, expanding into new geographies, executing disciplined acquisitions, and delivering consistent dividends. This dynamic between the two approaches has been healthy for the ecosystem and highlights complementary strengths. Invention on one side, world class execution on the other.

Zia Chishti invented new models. Asif Peer mastered and scaled an existing one with exceptional discipline. From invisible braces to behavioural pairing technology at Afiniti, Zia repeatedly created the possibility of multi billion dollar outcomes. Systems, under Asif Peer, took the services model and turned it into Pakistan’s most valuable listed tech company through relentless execution, geographic expansion, disciplined M&A, and consistent dividends. Neither approach is inherently superior. They are complementary. None of this is to understate Systems’ enormous contribution to the Pakistani and global tech ecosystem.

The Zia portfolio stack was also intellectually ambitious in a way nothing else from Pakistan has matched. Afiniti’s behavioural pairing IP was, in substance, an applied AI product nearly a decade before the term became boardroom vocabulary. Digital Globe Services had built genuine technology around paid search customer acquisition with DGSmart. ibex moved from pure voice BPO toward CX technology and what the company calls BPO 2.0.

Several of those swings produced something Pakistani public investors had never previously had. The genuine possibility of a listed unicorn moment. That IPO did not happen. None of that, however, should retroactively dim what was built. A vehicle that took thirty thousand plus seats of employment to scale across six continents, produced a billion dollar unicorn mark in private markets, and listed assets on three exchanges across two decades, is not a failure. It is a near miss due to corporate greed and differences. The right response to a near miss is to study it.

Zia Chishti also had a profound generational impact that is still little known. Under his tenure, TRG helped hundreds of Pakistanis secure opportunities in the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, the Middle East and Turkey. The compensation packages he introduced, roughly Rs 1 million for senior local employees and hundreds of thousands of dollars for on shore Pakistani staff, were virtually unheard of in Pakistan at the time. Most of all he gave the youth of Pakistan hope. Those graduating from average universities and programmes, with talent and desire but few channels to global firms, saw in Zia and TRG a world, a life, and a paradigm shift that could be.

The company became a nursery of talent whose alumni later powered Systems Limited and other local firms, and moved into global AI companies. Arbisoft’s founder, Yasser Bashir, is also an Align/Chishti protégé. A brilliant creator in his own right, who served as Director of Technology at Orthoclear and Manager of Software Engineering at Align before founding Arbisoft in 2007. Arbisoft today employs over 1,000 engineers, serving clients including Amazon, Microsoft, edX and KAYAK. The same talent wave also strengthened Systems Limited, where many TRG alumni now occupy senior roles, demonstrating how the two ecosystems have cross pollinated and reinforced Pakistan’s overall tech capability.

The entire Pakistani tech ecosystem benefited from the skills pipeline Zia built. English proficiency, technology, finance, AI enabled customer experience, and shared services at scale. The TRG ecosystem under his leadership trained and employed an estimated 95,000 to 120,000 unique individuals in Pakistan. A talent wave that continues to flow through the industry long after his departure (see Lifetime Jobs tab in the atlas above for methodology). That number is staggering in context. It represents roughly a fifth of one year’s Pakistani IT graduating class, hired and trained by a single ecosystem, with the bulk of attrition feeding directly into the wider local industry.

A vehicle that took thirty thousand plus seats of employment to scale across six continents and produced a billion dollar unicorn mark in private markets is not a failure. It is a near miss due to those who shook the foundations of the organisation, potentially and allegedly for self gain. The right response to a near miss is to study it, so the governance challenges Zia faced are documented, and never let happen again in Pakistan.

Now consider Systems Limited. Founded in 1977 as Pakistan’s first software house by Aezaz Hussain, listed on the PSX in December 2014 at roughly Rs 3.7 billion market capitalisation, and led today by Asif Peer, Systems trades around Rs 224 billion in May 2026, having peaked above Rs 252 billion at end 2025, equivalent to about $910 million at then prevailing exchange rates. Employee headcount has roughly tripled since 2020 to about 8,500 globally, including a significant footprint across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt and South Africa, and offshore operations in India via affiliated entities in the US.

The Visionet thread is worth unpacking. Systems Limited acquired Visionet Systems Inc. (a US company founded around 1994 to 1995 by Arshad Masood, formerly of IBM) through a merger in 1998. Visionet’s New Jersey operations brought a US distribution arm and a separate corporate vehicle that, over time, also spawned Visionet Systems Pvt Ltd in India (incorporated 2006), with overlapping executives including Arshad Masood. The structure has given Systems indirect exposure to India delivery capacity. An option TRG never built. Group revenue grew from Rs 53 billion in 2023 to Rs 80 billion in 2025. Net profit in 2025 was over Rs 11 billion.

By every conventional metric, Systems is the success story of Pakistani listed technology. It crossed the symbolic PKR 100 billion market cap threshold in September 2021 as the first Pakistani IT company to do so. It executes disciplined bolt on acquisitions. NdcTech, BAT Shared Services, Confiz. It pays dividends. It opens new geographies. The PSX rewards it with a multiple typically reserved for predictable compounders, and it earns that multiple by behaving like one.

Before the business, the vision and operating thesis tell their own story. One company chose to operate three hundred metres from the White House. The other built its corporate office across from the legendary Kaybees in Karachi. The point is not that one is right and one is wrong. It is that local and global markets reward these approaches very differently.

Let us examine the underlying business closely. Systems is structurally a services integrator with an unusually strong delivery culture. It implements Temenos for banks, deploys Microsoft Dynamics for retailers, builds custom code and runs growing BPO operations. It does this exceptionally well. What it does not have is a marquee proprietary product. There is no equivalent of NetSol’s NFS Ascent. There is no Afiniti equivalent piece of patented IP. There is no platform that the market would value on a software multiple rather than on a services multiple.

Systems’ own ventures into the kinds of bets Chishti’s portfolio represented have been modest and, to date, unrewarding. In January 2020 the International Finance Corporation took a 20 percent stake in OneLoad, a Systems fintech subsidiary operated by E-Processing Systems, at a $14.5 million valuation. Its first Pakistani fintech investment in over a decade. A 2022 round led by Sarmayacar and Abu Dhabi based Shorooq Partners added $11 million. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has also invested. OneLoad has acquired more than 50,000 retailers and in principle EMI approval from SBP, but it has not produced a breakout fintech outcome. The trajectory is real but slow. From an outside in view, a firm with this much tech talent, and such a thoughtful acquisition target, has shown surprisingly little product depth or appetite to innovate at the platform layer.

In May 2021, Systems Ventures put Rs 468 million (approximately $3 million) into Retailistan, the parent of SalesFlo, for a 20 percent stake. In March 2022, it joined a $22.5 million Series A for the B2B e commerce startup Jugnu, Retailistan’s sister company, alongside MENA based Sary and Sarmayacar. Jugnu shut down its core operations in July 2023, fifteen months after that round closed. The company cited tough economic conditions globally and locally. Former employees cited inventory pilferage and management failure. SalesFlo as a distribution tech tool persists. The broader bet did not. It had a great start, but operators seldom operate their way to unicorns. By contrast, the only marquee outcome from Pakistan’s 2020 to 2022 startup wave that genuinely returned capital was the e-TeleQuote sale on the TRG side, and even that was three years before it was later relinquished for $5 million.

This is not a criticism of Systems’ management. I am, in fact, a huge admirer of what it is and how Asif Peer has led it. It is an observation about a model. Systems is what you get when a country incentivises predictable foreign currency services revenue with consistent dividends and modest M&A. It is the proven compounding case for Pakistani tech, executed with exceptional discipline. Asif Peer has proven the services model works at scale and is arguably the best steward Systems Limited could have had. The frontier and platform case is what TRG attempted. Pakistan does not need to choose between them. It needs to build the second on the strong foundation of the first.

While Zia Chishti’s portfolio showed the power (and fragility) of applied AI platform bets and Asif Peer demonstrated world class services compounding, a third model quietly produced Pakistan’s single largest tech exit to date. The Gadit family’s Gaditek and Disrupt.com venture building machine.

A tight knit group of two brothers and a cousin who grew up together in Karachi, Aaqib Gadit (Cloudways CEO, later DigitalOcean CRO), Uzair Gadit (PureVPN CEO), and Umair Gadit, founded Gaditek around 2008 as a bootstrapped software development and venture incubator. What began as a services and engineering operation evolved into a repeatable product company factory.

The Gadit family’s real superpower was not simply building products. It was mastering digital customer acquisition and product led growth. The lessons learned scaling PureVPN’s paid search marketing, ad tech optimisation, and direct to consumer channels became the repeatable engine they applied to Cloudways and every subsequent brand. This gave them capital efficient, high margin growth that services only models rarely achieve.

No meaningful direct capital inflow or public market compounding occurred inside Pakistan from the exit itself. The talent pipeline, salaries, and IT export revenue benefited the country. But the equity upside did not compound domestically the way it could have under different policy rails.

This is not a failure story. It is a highly successful bootstrapped Pakistani origin product company that reached global scale and delivered the country’s largest tech exit. It is also a clear illustration of why the policy asks that follow are urgent.

The limits of optimising only for services compounding matter now more than at any earlier moment in Pakistan’s IT export story.

The work that powers Systems’ growth, implementing other people’s software, writing custom code, staffing offshore engineering pods, is precisely what the current generation of coding agents and large language models compresses fastest. The contact centre work that powered ibex’s labour base in its earlier voice BPO era is at even more direct risk from conversational AI. Both businesses sit on the wrong side of the AI cost curve when measured in hours of labour terms.

What survives this transition? Proprietary IP. Defensible data. Model led platforms. Software products the market values for the asset rather than for the hours behind it. Afiniti was, in this sense, prescient. NetSol’s NFS Ascent has the same character in its vertical. Avanceon and Octopus, in their smaller way, are building in this direction within industrial automation.

Pakistan’s listed technology sector contains exactly one durable proprietary product moat at significant scale, NFS Ascent, and Pakistan’s only unicorn by lineage, Afiniti, attempted to be exactly the kind of company that would now have a moat. The country’s body shopping model, however brilliantly Systems executes it, is on a path of slow margin compression.

Most critically, the freelancer economy has become a vital distributed engine of dollar inflows. According to State Bank of Pakistan and Payoneer data, Pakistan’s total IT and ITeS exports reached approximately $3.8 billion in FY 2024 to 2025, with full year FY 2025 to 2026 tracking toward $4.5 billion. Freelancers, having grown from $396 million in FY2021 to $710 million in FY2024, generated $856 million in just the first nine months of FY 2025 to 2026 (a 50 percent year on year jump, per SBP). Full year freelancer earnings are on track to approach or exceed $1 billion. Pakistan is now the world’s eighth fastest growing freelance economy, with more than three million active participants.

Pakistan produces tens of thousands of IT graduates annually who enter this ecosystem. Optimising only for predictable services revenue or freelance volume is a slow margin path in an era when the marginal cost of engineering hours trends toward zero.

The Chishti portfolio proved that Pakistani origin talent and capital can compete at the frontier. The post leadership value destruction underscored the risks of discontinuity. The hypothesis is straightforward. Pakistan must make the ambitious, IP led model not exceptional but routine.

The lesson here is not that holding company structures with offshore vehicles are problematic. It is the opposite. Afiniti, ibex and Digital Globe Services could only have been built with the capital and customer access that US, UK and Bermudian structures provided. Every Indian unicorn from Flipkart to Razorpay to Zerodha is Singapore or Cayman domiciled. The same is true of Israeli unicorns and most South East Asian fintech and consumer tech. The structure is not the problem. The problem is that Pakistan has not yet built the rails to do this systematically, and to ensure Pakistani founders, employees and public shareholders compound alongside such offshore structures rather than in parallel to them.

The Gadit family’s journey with Gaditek and Disrupt.com and Cloudways offers both inspiration and a cautionary lesson. On the positive side, it is a classic bootstrapped Pakistani origin success story. A family team that built a genuine global product (managed cloud hosting), scaled it to above $52 million revenue with strong growth, achieved a $350 million exit, Pakistan’s largest tech exit to date, and then redeployed the proceeds into a $100 million commitment to AI first ventures. The model relied heavily on Pakistani engineering talent while mastering product led growth and digital customer acquisition at scale.

Yet the structure also highlights the structural gap the country still faces. Cloudways was Malta domiciled. The exit proceeds were captured offshore. Founders relocated primarily to the UAE. Reinvestment is now happening through foreign vehicles in Dubai and Dublin. Once again, Pakistan served as the engine room for talent and operations, while value capture and governance lived elsewhere. This mirrors the TRG and Afiniti experience and reinforces why making foreign holdco formation routine, redesigning export rebates to reward IP and SaaS, and building proper rails for founders to keep operational gravity in Pakistan are no longer optional. They are prerequisites for the next wave of scaled product companies.

Three asks for the State Bank of Pakistan, the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan, and the Pakistan Software Export Board, in priority order:

Pakistan has one listed company that compounded brilliantly through services excellence, Systems Limited under Asif Peer, and one founder whose portfolio repeatedly attempted to build at the frontier, and at its last Series D showed everyone that it can be done. The first model created the country’s most valuable listed tech business. The second showed what is possible when we push further. The Gaditek and Disrupt.com story proves a third path also works. Bootstrapped, product led, global from day one, even if the value capture happened offshore.

In an era where the cost of a marginal engineer is being compressed toward zero, the country that produces tens of thousands of IT graduates a year cannot afford to keep optimising only for the first model. It needs to make the second model legal, capital efficient and routine.

The next Afiniti will not announce itself. The state should be busy building the conditions for it to arrive, and then protecting the founders who build it, so that what happened to Zia and to TRG’s shareholders, in an AI arms race they were a decade ahead in, never happens again.