Abdullah Rafique, Co-Founder of Vyro and its flagship product ImagineArt, has built one of the more prominent AI product companies to come out of Pakistan’s incubation ecosystem, starting his journey at NUST before building his startup at NSTP. The company shipped one of the first AI image generators on the market, launching ImagineArt at a time when Midjourney was still in private beta, positioning the Pakistani founded product among the earliest entrants in what has since become one of the most competitive categories in consumer AI.
The company’s early work centered on solving a specific technical problem well before generative AI became mainstream, building the first AI background remover capable of running entirely on a phone’s RAM, and later expanding that capability into one of the more advanced AI image editors available on Android. That foundation in on device AI processing gave the team the technical grounding to move into image generation as the broader field began to take off.
The company’s products have earned recognition beyond user numbers alone. For two consecutive years, Andreessen Horowitz named Imagine and RemoveIt among the top 50 AI products of the year, a distinction that places the Pakistani built company alongside some of the most closely watched names in global AI. Today, the company generates more than 35 million dollars in annual recurring revenue and has its technology integrated inside ChatGPT, extending its reach well beyond its own standalone apps.
Reflecting on the milestone of turning 26, Rafique described a decade of setting increasingly ambitious yearly goals, noting that reaching over a million dollars in annual revenue by age 20 did not bring the sense of purpose he was looking for, which pushed him toward building products he felt mattered more. His account frames ImagineArt’s growth as the product of continuous reinvention rather than a single breakthrough moment, with the company’s trajectory from an early AI image tool to a $35 million ARR business integrated into one of the world’s most used AI platforms standing as a marker of what a Pakistan built startup can achieve on the global stage.
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