IBA Center for Entrepreneurial Development, Innovation and Research is bringing back Chai Connections, framing the informal networking meetup around a simple but genuinely accurate premise, that a founder’s next co-founder, investor, client, mentor, or collaborator could be sitting just one cup of chai away. The framing captures something true about how a large share of early founder relationships actually form, not through formal introductions or structured matchmaking, but through the kind of low pressure, repeated social contact that a recurring community event is specifically designed to create.
The meetup brings together founders, entrepreneurs, alumni, startups, and members of the broader IBA CEDIR community to reconnect, exchange ideas, and build meaningful relationships, treating the gathering less as a one-time networking push and more as an ongoing ritual that keeps the university’s entrepreneurial community connected between larger, more formal programming. Recurring events of this kind tend to serve a different function than one-off pitch competitions or workshops, since their value compounds over multiple editions as attendees build familiarity with each other over time rather than trying to extract value from a single, high pressure encounter.
Organizers describe the event as a space to explore new opportunities for collaboration, whether attendees are looking to meet potential partners, connect with fellow founders working through similar early stage challenges, discover entirely new opportunities they had not previously considered, or simply catch up with familiar faces from earlier cohorts and past editions of the same meetup. That range of stated purposes reflects an understanding that not every attendee comes to a networking event with the same specific goal, and a well run recurring meetup needs to accommodate founders at very different stages, from those actively hunting for a co-founder to those who have already built a team and are simply maintaining relationships within the broader ecosystem.
Chai Connections is scheduled for Friday, 18 September 2026, from 3:30 PM to 4:30 PM, on the 11th Floor of Aman Tower at IBA City Campus. Interested attendees can register through this link to be part of the conversation. The event continues IBA CEDIR’s broader approach to community building, which has increasingly relied on informal, recurring touchpoints alongside its more structured programming such as pitching competitions, awareness sessions, and cohort based incubation tracks, giving Karachi’s student and alumni entrepreneurial community a lower stakes, more social complement to its formal entrepreneurship curriculum.
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