Accelerate Prosperity and Sindh Enterprise Development Fund have announced the first two businesses to receive financing through their collaboration, which aims to widen access to affordable formal finance for startups and small and medium enterprises across Sindh. Both are from Karachi. Bioniks makes affordable, AI-powered prosthetic limbs locally, and asani.io builds smart internet of things systems for water, power and gas. The two companies are the first to use the financing pathway that the institutions set up, and they have said more disbursements will follow.
The pathway is built as a referral-to-finance pipeline. Accelerate Prosperity, a programme of the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme, identifies high potential startups and small businesses in Sindh and prepares them for formal finance, working with them on their financials, structures and readiness for lenders. Sindh Enterprise Development Fund then evaluates each business against its mandate and priority sectors, and provides a markup subsidy based on the Karachi Interbank Offered Rate, which lowers the cost of borrowing. The two institutions signed a memorandum of understanding in February to put this arrangement in place, and the first financing shows it moving from an agreement to actual lending.
The collaboration targets a long standing gap in the province. Many promising businesses have viable products and growing markets, but find it hard to get formal credit because borrowing is expensive, they lack the collateral that banks ask for, or lenders see them as too risky. By pairing the hands-on enterprise support and patient debt of Accelerate Prosperity with the subsidy of Sindh Enterprise Development Fund, the arrangement tackles both problems at once, so that businesses arrive at the lender better prepared and the finance they receive costs less.
The first two recipients show the range of businesses the pathway is meant to reach. Bioniks, founded in Karachi in 2016, builds bionic arms that carry international quality certifications and recently secured medical device registration in Malaysia, while asani.io offers monitoring and automation systems that help households and businesses manage water, power and gas. Both are hardware businesses with real products, and such companies often need working capital and equipment finance that early stage investors do not provide. Sindh Enterprise Development Fund was set up by the Government of Sindh to encourage investment in small and medium enterprises, and the new financing adds two Karachi companies to a list of beneficiaries that the institutions expect to grow.
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