OPEN Karachi welcomed Anwar Kabir, president of OPEN Lahore, along with Faisal Kamiran, treasurer of OPEN Lahore, for a visit on September 14 aimed at strengthening ties between two of Pakistan’s most active OPEN chapters. Kamiran’s presence carries added weight given his recent recognition with the APSUP Excellence Award 2026 for Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year for his work building Addo AI, giving the delegation direct credibility drawn from a currently active, globally engaged Pakistani technology founder rather than purely an administrative chapter leadership visit.
The OPEN Karachi team, including Kamran Bilgrami, Farhan Ahmed, and Adeel Shahid, hosted their Lahore counterparts for an exchange of ideas around community building, youth engagement, entrepreneurship, and new opportunities for collaboration between the two chapters. Cross-chapter visits of this kind matter for an organization like OPEN, whose value depends substantially on the strength and consistency of its city-level chapters, since a Lahore chapter operating in relative isolation from Karachi’s activity would leave founders in either city with a narrower network than the organization’s national scale ostensibly promises.
Both sides described strong alignment and shared enthusiasm to take the OPEN Pakistan community forward, a framing that positions the meeting as substantive coordination rather than a purely ceremonial courtesy visit between chapter leaderships. OPEN Karachi emphasized that OPEN functions as more than a collection of individual chapters, describing Lahore, Karachi, and Islamabad as part of one community connected through a global platform built by Pakistani entrepreneurs for Pakistani entrepreneurs, a framing that reinforces OPEN’s identity as a diaspora-linked network extending well beyond any single city’s local ecosystem.
The visit closes with an explicit intention to turn these conversations into meaningful joint initiatives, suggesting the meeting was treated as a starting point for concrete collaborative programming between the two chapters rather than a one-off networking exercise. The engagement adds to a broader pattern of institutional coordination emerging across Pakistan’s various city-based entrepreneurship networks this year, echoing similar collaboration efforts between other NIC centers and ecosystem organizations working to build a more connected national startup infrastructure rather than a set of disconnected regional hubs.
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