A distinguished delegation from California visited NSTP, including Richard Robert Lee Lobley, Special Advisor to the California State Treasurer, Samantha Ayers Corbin, a Government and Business Advisor, Engineer Maqsood Ali Kamboh, Founder of TSI Engineering Inc, and Dr Muhammad Zain Arif, Chief of Operations at HALO. The visit brought together officials and business figures with direct ties to California’s public financial and technology sectors, giving them a firsthand look at Pakistan’s deep tech ecosystem as it operates on the ground rather than through secondhand reporting alone.
Director NSTP, Engineer Amer Sheikh, walked the delegation through NSTP’s innovation ecosystem, covering everything from the Park’s research and development infrastructure to the pipeline connecting NUST research directly to market-ready ventures. During the briefing, Sheikh shared that NSTP resident startups have collectively attracted over 2 million dollars in investment from US venture capital firms, a figure he described as a clear signal of growing international confidence in Pakistan’s deep tech sector specifically, rather than technology investment more broadly.
The delegation was introduced to two of NSTP’s resident startups during the visit, OrbitEd and Kodifly, with particular attention given to Kodifly’s work as a spatial intelligence company using LiDAR and computer vision fused with artificial intelligence to help infrastructure operators run safer, smarter railways, highways, and urban assets. Kodifly has secured 750,000 dollars in funding from Laidlaw Scholars Ventures and gone on to partner with global players including NEXCOM International, all while continuing to operate out of NSTP, giving the visiting delegation a concrete example of how the Park’s resident startups are translating early research into commercially viable, internationally connected businesses.
The visit reflects a broader pattern of international officials and business figures engaging directly with NSTP as a way of assessing Pakistan’s deep tech capabilities firsthand, particularly figures connected to California’s technology and public finance sectors, given the state’s outsized role in global venture capital activity. For NSTP, visits of this kind serve a dual purpose, offering resident startups like Kodifly and OrbitEd direct visibility to potential future investors or partners, while also reinforcing NSTP’s own positioning as what its messaging describes as the innovation powerhouse of Pakistan, a hub capable of producing startups with genuine international investment traction rather than ventures limited purely to the domestic market.
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