The final round of National Incubation Center Peshawar’s Cohort 14 Startup Pitching League concluded with dekord securing first place, while Faryal’s Baby Photography was named first runner-up, closing out a competitive stretch that gave participating startups a structured stage to demonstrate how far their ideas had progressed since joining the cohort. A pitching league format, rather than a single one-off pitch day, allows founders to be evaluated across multiple rounds rather than a single high pressure moment, giving judges a fuller picture of consistency and improvement over time rather than a snapshot performance.
The startups presented their ideas before a panel comprising Bilal Farooq Khan, Afshan Khan, Saba Durrani, Sami Syed, and Fahd Amin, a judging lineup spanning different areas of expertise likely reflecting the range of sectors represented across Cohort 14’s startups. Having judges with varied backgrounds evaluate pitches together tends to surface a more rounded assessment of a startup’s potential, since a venture that impresses on technical merit alone may still fall short on market viability or communication clarity, and a panel spanning multiple disciplines is better positioned to catch that kind of gap than a single evaluator working alone.
dekord’s win places it at the top of a cohort that included ventures spanning notably different sectors, alongside PQC Labs and Aartec Publishing among the startups that took part in the broader competition. The breadth of sectors represented, from a service business built around baby photography to more technically oriented ventures, points to Cohort 14’s composition drawing from a wide cross-section of entrepreneurial activity rather than concentrating narrowly around a single industry vertical, a pattern that has become increasingly common across NIC cohorts as incubation centers look to build ecosystems that serve founders regardless of sector.
NIC Peshawar extended congratulations to the winners and to all participating startups for demonstrating strong ideas, progress, and entrepreneurial potential throughout the pitching league, framing the competition as a marker of development rather than a purely evaluative exercise. The event was supported by institutional partners including Ignite, LMKR, Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication, LMKT, and Orbit Startups, along with academic and industry collaborators such as Sybrid, IM Sciences, Rehman Medical Institute, CECOS University, and Frontier Platinum, continuing NIC Peshawar’s ongoing Cohort 14 programming within its broader incubation curriculum.
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