A Paklaunch meetup hosted at the Pakistan Stock Exchange brought together a notable gathering of capital markets and startup ecosystem leaders for discussions on bridging the gap between Pakistan’s formal capital markets and its growing startup and small and medium enterprise ecosystem. The conversation, framed around the future of Pakistan’s startup and SME landscape, drew together Naeem Khanani, Chief Executive Officer of DigiEstate, Farrukh H. Subzwari, Managing Director of the Pakistan Stock Exchange, Ali Farid Khawaja, Commissioner at the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan, Naiel Ikram, Partner at Fatima Gobi Ventures, and Danish Elahi, Chief Executive Officer of Elahi Group of Companies, creating a forum that connected the regulatory, exchange, venture capital, and founder perspectives on what it would take to meaningfully integrate Pakistan’s startup ecosystem with its public capital markets.
The substantive proposal to emerge from the discussions involved Naeem Khanani and Azfar Hussain, Director at National Incubation Center Karachi, jointly suggesting a strategic rebranding of the Pakistan Stock Exchange’s GEM Board to the Startup or SME Board. The GEM Board, which stands for Growth Enterprise Market, was originally designed to provide smaller and growth-stage companies with a more accessible listing pathway than the main board, but the proposal reflects a view that the current naming does not adequately communicate this purpose to the startup and SME founders who would be its most natural and beneficial users. A name that explicitly signals Startup or SME Board would more directly target the audience the board was designed to serve, potentially increasing awareness and reducing the perception among early-stage founders that public listing is an avenue reserved for large, established corporations rather than a genuinely accessible growth and exit pathway available to smaller, high-growth ventures.
Beyond the naming proposal, the discussion produced a concrete commitment to action in the form of an offer to mobilise joint roundtables at National Incubation Centers across Pakistan, creating a structured mechanism for driving awareness among founders about public listing as a viable pathway for capital raising and growth, and for facilitating the practical steps that startups and SMEs would need to take to move toward public listing. This proposal reflects a recognition that the gap between startups and public capital markets in Pakistan is not solely a matter of board design or naming convention but also one of awareness, education, and the practical guidance that founders need to understand whether and how public listing fits into their growth strategy. By proposing to bring this conversation directly into the incubation centres where startups are already engaging with structured support programming, the initiative aims to introduce capital markets literacy into the standard curriculum of founder development rather than treating it as a specialised, separate consideration relevant only once a company has already reached significant scale.
The participation of senior figures from the Pakistan Stock Exchange and Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan in this conversation signals that the proposals raised at the Paklaunch meetup are being heard by the institutions with the actual authority to implement changes of this nature, giving the discussion a practical significance beyond a typical networking conversation. For Pakistan’s broader ambition of building a more dynamic, accessible, and growth-oriented capital market ecosystem capable of supporting the scaling of its digital economy, the kind of direct dialogue between exchange leadership, regulators, venture capital practitioners, and startup founders that characterised this meetup represents the sort of cross-institutional engagement that meaningful capital market reform for high-growth ventures will likely require to move from proposal to implementation.
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