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Like its American role-model, Pakistan’s start-up scene has also moved in herds — online retail and ride-hailing services being the two recent hot favourites. But things are not as routine for Perihelion Systems.
This is more of a social start-up — an enterprise that uses high tech solutions to help address social problems. If you’re a little confused by what that means you’re not alone, but it also means you’re not challenged by society in ways many others are. Founded in Karachi by Syed Faizan Hussain, 24, as a not-for-profit organisation, Perihelion has launched five products over its life — some more successful than others.
The journey began five years ago when Faizan, along with a friend, developed his first social innovation project, Edu-Aid: an American Sign Language Translator that takes gestures as input from camera and converts them into a corresponding voice. Initial success followed when they won the regional finals of Microsoft Imagine Cup 2014 but were unable to attend the nationals.
The company then built PoolIt, a ride-hailing service, before Careem and Uber made their way into the Pakistani market. But due to logistical constraints, the product had to be abandoned; just like another one, Glove Gauge — a wearable tool aimed at speeding up production processes through integrating working steps into natural movement of the hand.
In a world of stampeding herds, Faizan was different, the lone wolf perhaps, seeking his own way, following his own instincts, and suffering his own setbacks. Innovative as his apps were, none of them took off. But this couldn’t bring him down as he went on to build OneHealth — a disease surveillance and tracking system that uses medical data to not only predict an individual or group’s susceptibility to diseases given certain demographics but also forecast epidemic outbreaks. It started when an NGO approached him to create a simple application for digitising its survey methods.
During the course of the development, he and his team realised they had data which could be analysed systematically for far more meaningful purposes. The NGO agreed to run the pilot project and the application was launched.
OneHealth is particularly targeted at policymakers and can be a game-changer in the way health policy is devised. But it’s not surprising in a country where public healthcare has been in a pathetic state for years, the application has struggled to get attention from those in charge of making decisions.
Unlike most Pakistani start-ups that seek to directly target consumers with easy day-to-day use solutions, Perihelion is far more sophisticated in its technology and has a different pool of clients — such as government bodies or NGOs.
But that has only made things more difficult for Faizan; especially while pitching ideas to investors and clients who almost never have the technical domain to grasp the viability of his products. “In 2015 when I tried to pitch 3D printer to an investor, he asked me how it’s different from a lathe machine and what’s the utility if he can use that instead?” he recalls with amusement.
Perihelion’s story is one with Faizan’s, who has been its only constant member since inception. A machine geek who had a hard time adjusting to the standardised educational system of learning, it is no surprise that even now, he has taken the road less travelled.
Leaving a job with Microsoft, Faizan embarked on his entrepreneurial pursuits. But being a raw talent, he was clueless about all things business-related, for which he rightly blames the country’s outdated and pedantic education system.
However, things changed for the better when he earned a scholarship to study entrepreneurship at Indiana University. Upon return, he launched Venture Dart in 2016, a for-profit technology consultancy and outsourcing company that works on a freelance basis for small clients. To this day, this entity finances Perihelion Systems.
Recognition followed when he was awarded the Queen’s Young Leaders Award in 2017 by Queen Elizabeth. Just this year, he was named in Forbes 30 under 30. Faizan is optimistic that these will help him create an international network through which he can penetrate other regions as well.
Operating in a relatively untapped industry both globally and locally, with a few major players penetrating only recently, Faizan is ambivalent about what the future holds for him. While the entry of these giants might pose an existential risk to his business, he thinks it would at least create awareness and set the wheels in motion for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in Pakistan. “AI domain in which we operate is fairly new where I can’t see any local threat in the near future. But as IBM with their Watson and Google through its Deepmind continue to invest and research on AI technology, it can potentially draw us out of the market and make us dependent on their solutions,” he notes.
Philanthropic at its core and backed by hi-tech, Perihelion Systems has immense challenges ahead in gathering more interest from clients and investors alike. But with Faizan’s resilience and Iqbal’s motivational poetry guiding him through, the company is likely to stay in the game and carve the path for tech-oriented social start-ups.
The writer is member of staff:
Twitter: @MutaherKhan
Published in Dawn, May 13th, 2018
