Pakistani immigrants are behind ten US billion-dollar startups, from a $60B AI code editor to a $5B workflow platform for agentic AI.
A 2026 study by the National Foundation for American Policy found that Pakistani immigrants are among the founders or co-founders of ten privately held US companies valued at one billion dollars or more. The study, covering 775 unicorn companies tracked by CB Insights as of April 2026, found that 59 per cent have at least one immigrant founder. Pakistan ranks eleventh globally for immigrant unicorn founders, ahead of Australia, Romania, and Taiwan. The ten Pakistani founders represent companies across AI infrastructure, healthcare, blockchain, fleet technology, defence systems, and e-commerce. Collectively, they have built some of the most consequential private companies in the American technology economy.
Here are the ten founders and what each one built.
Sualeh Asif, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Anysphere (Cursor)
Born in Karachi in 2000 and a former International Mathematical Olympiad representative for Pakistan, Sualeh Asif co-founded Anysphere in 2022 while studying at MIT. The company’s product, Cursor, is an AI-powered code editor that became the development environment of choice for professional engineers across the Fortune 500. By November 2025, Cursor had reached a valuation of $29.3 billion and more than one billion dollars in annualised revenue. In June 2026, SpaceX acquired Anysphere for $60 billion, making Asif the youngest Pakistani-origin tech founder to reach billionaire status at 26, with an estimated stake of approximately $2.7 billion at the time of the acquisition.
Mo Shaikh Co-Founder, Aptos Labs
Mo Shaikh came to America as a first-generation Pakistani immigrant and grew up in Brooklyn, raised by parents who arrived with almost nothing. After a career across financial technology firms, he joined Meta’s blockchain project Diem in 2021. When Meta shut Diem down in early 2022, Shaikh and his colleague Avery Ching co-founded Aptos Labs to build a new Layer 1 blockchain designed for high-volume, low-cost transactions. Aptos reached a valuation of approximately $18 billion at its peak, with its APT token becoming one of the most actively traded in the blockchain sector. Shaikh stepped down as CEO in December 2024 and subsequently launched Maximum Frequency Ventures, a $50 million fund focused on crypto and blockchain companies.
Qasar Younis, CEO, Applied Intuition
Qasar Younis grew up in Lala Moosa in Punjab’s Gujrat district and emigrated to the United States in 1988. He became the first Chief Operating Officer of Y Combinator, the accelerator behind Dropbox, Airbnb, and Stripe, before co-founding Applied Intuition in 2017. The company builds physical AI and simulation software for autonomous vehicles, serving defence programmes, automotive manufacturers, and technology firms developing self-driving systems. Applied Intuition is valued at $15 billion, placing it among the most valuable private enterprise software companies in the world. Younis remains CEO.
Samar Abbas, CEO, Temporal Technologies
Samar Abbas studied at the Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology in Pakistan before joining Microsoft and later Uber, where he worked on large-scale distributed systems. He co-founded Temporal Technologies in 2019 with Maxim Fateev to build a durable execution platform that makes long-running software workflows reliable at scale. Temporal raised a $300 million Series D in February 2026 at a $5 billion valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz, nearly tripling its valuation in under a year. The platform is used by hundreds of thousands of developers globally and has become core infrastructure for agentic AI deployments.
Saad Godil, Co-Founder and CTO, Hippocratic AI
Saad Godil co-founded Hippocratic AI in 2023 to build a safety-focused large language model designed specifically for healthcare applications. Prior to Hippocratic AI, Godil held technical roles at NVIDIA and Analog Devices, bringing deep hardware and systems expertise to a company whose founding principle is clinical reliability over raw capability. Hippocratic AI’s platform provides patients with AI-powered health guidance supported by a network of more than 7,500 US-licensed clinicians. The company raised $126 million in a Series C round in November 2025 at a $3.5 billion valuation.
Shoaib Makani, CEO and Founder, Motive
Shoaib Makani is a Pakistani immigrant who grew up in Texas and founded Motive, formerly KeepTruckin, in 2013. The company builds AI-powered fleet management and driver safety software for the North American trucking, construction, oil and gas, and logistics sectors, using computer vision and machine learning to reduce accidents and lower operating costs. Motive serves more than 120,000 customers and is valued at $2.85 billion. The company has established engineering and support operations in Lahore and Islamabad, creating a direct employment pipeline from Pakistan’s software talent pool into one of the most operationally demanding AI platforms in the US market.
Zaid Enam, Co-Founder,Cresta
Zaid Enam dropped out of secondary school in Pakistan to found MediConnect, a healthcare platform connecting patients with providers, before securing a place on Stanford’s computer science doctoral programme. He left Stanford in 2017 to co-found Cresta with Tim Shi and Sebastian Thrun. Cresta builds real-time AI software for enterprise contact centres, guiding agents through customer conversations using live machine learning inference. The company raised a $125 million Series D in November 2024 at a $1.6 billion valuation. Enam stepped down as CEO in 2023 and moved to an advisory role, with former Google Contact Center AI leader Ping Wu taking over operational leadership.
Amir Husain, Founder, Avathon (formerly SparkCognition)
Born in Lahore, Amir Husain studied at the University of Texas at Austin and founded SparkCognition in 2013 to build AI systems for industrial and defence applications, including predictive maintenance for power grids, oil and gas infrastructure, and military hardware. SparkCognition, now rebranded Avathon, reached unicorn status in January 2022 with a Series D valuation of over $1.4 billion. Husain also founded the defence-focused subsidiary Avathon Government, chaired by former US Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work, positioning Avathon as one of the few AI companies with established relationships across both commercial energy and the US defence establishment. He stepped down as CEO at the end of 2023.
Omair Tariq, Co-Founder, Cart.com
Omair Tariq arrived in Houston as a Pakistani immigrant shortly after September 11, 2001, and built a career in retail technology at Blinds.com and The Home Depot before co-founding Cart.com in October 2020. Cart.com provides end-to-end e-commerce infrastructure for brands, covering technology, fulfilment, and customer operations under one platform. The company raised approximately $400 million in venture capital and reached a valuation exceeding one billion dollars. Tariq stepped down as CEO in May 2024 to focus on long-term board-level strategy.
Talha Sattar, Founder, NimbleRx
Talha Sattar founded NimbleRx in 2014 to modernise the pharmacy sector, building software and logistics infrastructure that enables independent pharmacies to compete with national chains through online ordering and same-day delivery. Sequoia Capital backed the company from 2015. NimbleRx was subsequently acquired by Swoop, integrating its technology and delivery network into a broader healthcare distribution platform. Sattar holds an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and has been featured by Sequoia Capital as a case study in healthcare technology entrepreneurship.
What This Means
Pakistan’s eleventh-place global ranking for immigrant unicorn founders reflects a consistent output from a small number of institutions and cities, most notably the Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the engineering programmes that sent graduates to MIT, Stanford, UT Austin, and Harvard. The ten founders built companies across eight distinct sectors.
The more instructive observation is what their trajectories share. Technical formation happened in Pakistan. The capital, the market access, and the institutional networks required to commercialise that formation were in America. That gap is narrowing. Motive’s engineering operations in Lahore and Islamabad, the diaspora-backed funds making early-stage bets in Pakistani startups, and the growing number of Pakistani-origin technologists returning to build domestically all point to a shift that has been building for several years.
The ten founders in this list are proof that Pakistan produces engineers and entrepreneurs capable of building at the highest level of the global economy. What the domestic ecosystem has not yet fully provided is a credible path to do that building from Pakistan rather than despite it.
