NIC Karachi hosted an awareness online session for students of the National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, organised by Campus Ambassador Areeba Shafqat as part of an ongoing effort to connect students at the university with the incubator’s ecosystem and opportunities. The session introduced participants to the broader NIC Karachi ecosystem, the opportunities available through the incubator’s Cohort 16 programme, and what the startup journey typically looks like for founders moving from an early idea toward a functioning venture, giving students at the university a structured introduction to entrepreneurship well before many of them might otherwise encounter it through formal coursework.
Muhammad Furqan Karim Kidwai, Co-Founder and CEO of Plouton AI, shared his entrepreneurial experience during the session, placing particular emphasis on the importance of solving genuine real-world problems before committing to building either a startup or a Final Year Project. This framing offered students a useful distinction between building something purely for academic requirements and building something with actual commercial or social relevance, a distinction that often becomes clearer only after a founder has spent considerable time working on a venture without adequate grounding in a real problem. The session included an interactive question and answer segment covering entrepreneurship and the incubation process more broadly, giving students the opportunity to raise specific concerns or curiosities directly with someone who has already gone through the process of building and running a startup.
The session forms part of NIC Karachi’s Campus Ambassador Program, an initiative through which student representatives at partner universities organise events connecting their peers with the incubator’s resources and cohort opportunities. By working through ambassadors embedded directly within student communities, NIC Karachi is able to reach students who might not otherwise engage with incubation programming through more conventional outreach channels, relying instead on peer-to-peer promotion from someone already familiar with both the university’s student body and the incubator’s offerings.
The session was supported by Tech Destination Pakistan, the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication, Ignite National Technology Fund, LMKT, LuckyOne Mall, and Orbit Ventures, continuing the pattern of institutional backing behind NIC Karachi’s outreach and cohort-based programming. Through continued Campus Ambassador engagements of this kind, NIC Karachi is working to encourage a broader base of students to explore entrepreneurship and take their first steps toward building impactful startups, extending its reach into university communities across Karachi and beyond.
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