National Incubation Center Karachi is hosting a dedicated fundraising session for women founders titled Breaking the Bias, Owning the Ask on Wednesday, June 10, 2026, at 3:00 PM at the NIC Karachi premises. The session is led by Kashaf Jamal, Vice President of Investments and Monitoring at Fatima Gobi Ventures, one of Pakistan’s most active venture capital firms with a specific focus on backing women-led and underrepresented founder ventures. Registration is open through the official link at lnkd.in/dX2bGgsy, and the session is designed specifically for women founders who are preparing to navigate the fundraising process and want to do so with the clarity, tools, and confidence that come from understanding how investment decisions are actually made and what investors are genuinely evaluating when they engage with a fundraising founder.
The session title reflects a dual focus that distinguishes it from generic investor readiness workshops. Breaking the Bias addresses the structural and attitudinal barriers that women founders consistently encounter in fundraising environments, where implicit assumptions about founder credibility, risk tolerance, market ambition, and leadership capability create friction that their male counterparts do not face to the same degree. Understanding that this bias exists, where it tends to manifest in investor conversations, and how to navigate it without internalising it as a reflection of the quality of the venture is a form of fundraising literacy that is rarely addressed directly in startup programming but that has a significant impact on how women founders experience and perform in investor interactions. Owning the Ask addresses the confidence and clarity dimension, helping founders move from tentative, apologetic fundraising approaches into the kind of direct, well-grounded capital requests that investors respond to with seriousness and engagement.
Kashaf Jamal will guide participants through a set of practical fundraising tools that give the session a concrete, output-oriented dimension beyond knowledge delivery. The Madlib or Gaddie Pitch framework gives founders a structured template for articulating their venture’s value proposition, traction, and investment thesis in a format that is both memorable and compelling for investors who hear dozens of pitches in any given month. The one-pager and fundraising teaser deck cover the written materials that accompany and reinforce the verbal pitch, ensuring that founders leave with a clear understanding of what these documents need to contain and how they should be designed to advance rather than undermine the fundraising conversation. The funding readiness checklist, covering traction metrics, key performance indicators, and data room essentials, provides founders with a practical assessment tool they can use to evaluate their own readiness before approaching investors and to identify the specific gaps they need to close before their fundraising process begins in earnest.
The session also covers the funding ecosystem for women-led startups in Pakistan and the region, giving participants a clearer picture of which investors are actively looking to back women founders, what their investment criteria look like, and how to identify and prioritise the investor relationships most worth cultivating given the stage and sector of their venture. Cap table basics round out the curriculum, addressing an area where many first-time founders, regardless of gender, have significant knowledge gaps that can create problems during due diligence and term sheet negotiation if left unaddressed. NIC Karachi’s decision to host a session of this specificity and depth for women founders reflects the centre’s recognition that investment readiness programming that does not account for the distinct challenges women founders face in fundraising environments is incomplete, and that the quality of support available to women building within its ecosystem should be calibrated to the actual barriers they encounter rather than the generic ones that affect all founders equally. The session is supported by Tech Destination Pakistan, the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication, Ignite, LMKT, LuckyOne Mall, and Orbit Ventures.
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