Federal Minister of IT and Telecom Umar Saif has shared great news for Pakistani startups with ambitions of going global.
The minister has announced the approval of a new program called BridgeStart which will fund 100 startups each year to be incubated/accelerated in any of the top 40 incubators/accelerators all over the world.
Here is what Umar Saif said in his announcement:
From our experience at Plan9 and our 8 National Incubation Centers (NIC), we observed that startups which were able to make it to incubators such as YCombinator, Capital Factory, 500 startups etc grew much more rapidly as they were able to successfully tap into a more developed ecosystem and sources of funding. However, a lot of startups could not be part of such a program due to lack of resources for travel/lodging/expenses in a program abroad.
He added that BridgeStart will provide startups up to Rs. 5 million if they can qualify for these top 40 international programs. He says that the startup just needs to focus on being good enough to quality and BrigeStart will take care of the rest.
