Kashaf Akhtar’s EcoBricks won Episode 5 of Perfect Pitch, taking home a PKR 1 million prize on the national startup reality show broadcast by HUM TV Network under the Prime Minister’s Youth Programme and Higher Education Commission. EcoBricks, incubated at NIC Islamabad and built on Akhtar’s NUST engineering background, operates as a circular-economy venture converting non-recyclable plastic waste such as chips packets and wrappers into durable, 100 percent recycled tiles, planters, and school furniture. During the episode’s question and answer segment, the panel probed Akhtar on manufacturing process safety, a partnership with the Punjab Education Department for milk-pack recycling, and plans to expand through a French joint venture entity, details that pointed to a business already moving well past prototype stage into institutional partnerships and international structuring.
The episode’s jury included Ashraf Kaleem Ahmad, founding partner at Magnavus Ventures and an angel investor, Roma Labib, country director at Accelerate Prosperity, and Asim Ghaffar, board member at TiE Islamabad and vice president of engineering at Temenos, giving the panel a mix of early-stage investment, ecosystem development, and enterprise technology perspectives. The judges opened the episode discussing how entrepreneurs handle failure, overcome industry friction, and stay committed, framing resilience as a recurring theme they would be listening for across that day’s five pitches.
Ace Aeronautics, founded by Mohammad Ubaid Raza, finished as runner-up with AeroBall, described as Pakistan’s first collision-resilient caged drone equipped with thermal and LIDAR sensors for inspecting hazardous, inaccessible industrial spaces such as oil and gas pipelines and fire sites. Judges pressed Raza on his B2B and B2G pricing strategy, with his unit costing roughly 10,000 dollars against international alternatives priced near 36,000 dollars, and how the venture plans to compete against established Chinese drone hardware manufacturers on both price and reliability.
The episode’s other pitches spanned DigiDeaf, an inclusive platform from sisters Sakina and Zara Batool offering sign language courses, skill-building workshops, and mental health sessions for the deaf community with over 53,000 social media followers, and Easy Geyser, a smart automation device from Asher Baig and Sana Khattak that has sold more than 1,500 units across Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad with gross margins between 30 and 35 percent. HealthTune, presented by brothers Syed Wasif and Syed Sharik Mohammad, pitched an AI-powered voice-enabled clinical documentation platform transcribing multilingual doctor-patient conversations into medical reports, facing judge questions on HIPAA-style patient data privacy and doctor validation loops to prevent AI hallucinations. The episode also featured a success story segment on ConnectHear, an established technology startup bridging communication gaps and providing job accessibility for the deaf community, before project director Abdullah Soomro presented Akhtar with the winning PKR 1 million check to close the episode.
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