Why NSTP is the only science park in Pakistan that actually works

The opening frame: why this guest, why now

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Yaruq Nadeem as Senior Manager for Innovation and Partnerships at the National Science and Technology Park at NUST, and being unusually direct about why he wanted this conversation on the show. He has visited NSTP multiple times in person. He knows the stories from inside the building. And in his reading of Pakistan’s innovation landscape, this is the one model he is willing to say is operating at a level where it will not just survive but actually grow.

That is a strong claim on a podcast that interviews a lot of people in this space, and Muzamil wears it openly. “I do not want to put others down,” he says, but his point stands: NSTP is the only park he has watched run on a model that holds up over the long term. The rest of the episode is an attempt to understand why — what they do, how the structure works, what kinds of companies are inside, and how a founder with a real idea can actually plug in.

What a science park is — and what it is not

Yaruq’s first move is to clear up a confusion that he says comes up every time a visitor walks in. People hear “science park” and assume it is either an amusement park, an IT park or an incubator. It is none of those things.

His definition is precise. In most countries, academia, industry and government operate as disconnected silos. The university teaches material that has no direct line into industry. Industry is solving a different set of problems with a different set of constraints. The government writes policy from a third vantage point. A science park, in Yaruq’s framing, exists to break those silos and pull all three onto one platform, “so that we can build products and services that benefit society, and ideally are environmentally friendly too.”

The structural difference from an incubator is one he draws using a maths analogy. “An incubator is a subset of a science park,” he says. “The park does everything an incubator does, but it also does that for small and medium enterprises and for multinationals, on the same premises.” The difference from an IT park is sharper still. An IT park collects similar companies into one building and rents them desk space. NSTP does not. It evaluates every prospective tenant against a live three-part metric: economic performance, innovation output and interaction with academia. A company that is not doing R&D, not building new products, not hiring NUST students into internships and jobs, does not get to occupy the space. “Otherwise we do not give that kind of commercial space,” he says. “That is the difference.”

Five companies inside, and what they are actually building

Muzamil pushes for specifics. He is explicit that he is not interested in vanity startups — companies with an idea, some funding and no real revenue. He wants to know which businesses inside the park are commercially serious.

The first name Yaruq gives is VYRO. The story is worth holding in mind because it is the clearest argument for what the park is for. VYRO was inducted into NSTP’s pre-incubation programme, Hatchet, in December 2019. The founders were NUST students in the third semester of their bachelor’s at the SEECS school. They came in with a basic photo editing app. Yaruq tells a small story about VYRO that has stayed inside the building: the director arrived at the office at eight in the morning and found one of the co-founders washing his face in the bathroom. The founder explained he had not just arrived — he had slept in the office and was now getting up to start the next day’s work. Today, VYRO runs from inside NSTP with more than 100 employees on site, consultants across Europe and the US, recognition from the Google Play Store, and what Muzamil notes is roughly 260 million app downloads across its products. Two of those products are a text-to-image generator and a beta-stage app called SUSS that lets a user hear a song of their choice rendered in the voice of a chosen singer.

The second is LearnObots, working on STEM education for children. Yaruq’s framing is that the upstream cause of Pakistan’s thin startup pipeline is that bright children are funnelled through a standardised system that tells them to become doctors or engineers. LearnObots intervenes early, shipping DIY kits that let a child build a small robot and then programme it. When COVID hit, they ported the entire experience into a virtual environment where the child writes the programme and watches the robot move on screen. They now run STEM training across Pakistan, including in Gilgit-Baltistan.

The third is Orbit, a female-led team that secured $500,000 from Adam Draper. Orbit is building corporate training inside a VR environment, with software that reads how the user is using their hands, where they are looking, how often they break eye contact, and feeds back a structured assessment of their communication. Muzamil takes a moment on air to spell it out for the listener: O-R-B-I-T.

The fourth is Codefly, with one co-founder in Hong Kong and one in Pakistan, building digital twins of physical environments. Yaruq grounds the explanation in a single deployment: in Singapore, vegetation along rail corridors causes accidents. Codefly installs a LIDAR system on the trains, and the live feed lets operators see hazards forming on the line and clear them in advance, rather than responding after an incident. The economic logic, he points out, is that the cost of a single day’s downtime or a single accident dwarfs the cost of the system.

Where Pakistani founders actually fail

This is the section of the conversation where Muzamil’s own experience surfaces. He covered NIC in its early days and watched a long line of startups walk through with exciting decks. Ten, twelve, fifteen years in, he can name almost no breakout commercial story from that pipeline. “BookMe.pk is the only one I know of,” he says.

Yaruq’s diagnosis is unsentimental. A startup that works has to clear three tests: consumer demand, technical capability, and commercial viability. Pakistani founders, especially those from engineering and coding backgrounds, almost always over-invest in the second test before they have seriously interrogated the first. “Entrepreneurs have this bad habit of falling in love with their own idea,” he says. They sit down and code for months without ever speaking to a potential customer. The lean methodology — go to the customer with the most basic version, take feedback, tune the MVP — is the discipline they skip. And so when they finally make first contact with a real buyer, the product does not survive the encounter. They never reach the third test at all.

NSTP’s intervention is structural. Idea-stage startups enter a pre-incubation programme that gives them free shared co-working space, a structured workshop track on the key elements they have to cover, and an in-house coach assigned for the duration. The coaches are a deliberate feature of the model: because the park hosts every stage of company, an AI-stage founder who hits a machine learning wall can walk down the corridor and knock on VYRO’s door rather than searching LinkedIn for an expert in California. On top of that, Yaruq has adapted Y Combinator’s Startup School KPI model to Pakistani conditions. YC runs weekly check-ins; he found that too tight for the local context and runs biweekly check-ins instead. The principle, he says, is the same: either you fail fast, or you accelerate on a working trajectory — but you do not drift.

Exposure, and what to do if you cannot afford a plane ticket

Muzamil sharpens the conversation by pushing on something he has been thinking about for a while. He sees smart young engineers in Pakistan building solid technical products aimed squarely at the local market, and he wants to ask — gently, without discouraging them — whether that is the right target. Given the level of skill they have, the revenue ceiling is higher if they build for buyers elsewhere. What is stopping them is exposure. They do not know how the world outside thinks.

Yaruq agrees. NSTP runs a programme called Innovation Inside, a two-to-three-hour workshop they open up to students from across Pakistan, including from outside Islamabad. The format is consistent: an overview of the ecosystem, a walkthrough of what NSTP can do for them, a simple blueprint for how to map a business model onto a single page of paper. What he has noticed running these sessions is that the exposure gap is real and is not only a foreign-versus-domestic gap. A NUST student in Islamabad already has a clearer read on local consumer demand than a student in a smaller city. A student abroad has a clearer read still.

His prescription for a founder who cannot travel is layered. Secondary research using ChatGPT and the newer tools — he specifically names DeepSeek as part of the toolkit at the user’s fingertips — gets a founder some of the way. Beyond that, the substitute for travel is a mentor who has lived the journey, including the failures. “The things they will teach you in months, you would take years to learn on your own.” On top of mentorship, he wants founders connected to industry — visiting factories, sitting with operators, picking a final-year project that solves a real industrial problem rather than one that exists to clear a grade.

The diaspora corridor that is already open, and the one that is not

Muzamil raises the diaspora question carefully. He pushes back on the narrative that overseas Pakistanis are abandoning the country, and reframes the movement as extension rather than exit. He then describes a man in his own community — second- or third-generation French, family lineage Pakistani via Morocco, who has kept Urdu alive and now wants to invest energy back into Pakistan but does not know where to start. Is there a programme at NSTP for this?

Yaruq’s answer is honest. NSTP’s strongest diaspora connections are on the US west coast — the Park Launch community and Open Silicon Valley — and the conversation has made him realise that the European corridor and other geographies are under-built. Where they do have partnerships in place, the mechanism is matchmaking: NSTP takes a need from a local startup — an investor, a mentor, a partnership — and runs it through the diaspora network until the right person surfaces. He uses the public moment on the podcast to issue a direct invitation: when a member of the diaspora is next planning a trip to Islamabad, reach out via NSTP’s social channels and they will host a visit. “Seeing is believing,” he says.

The UK chapter — what a top-five degree actually changes

The second half of the episode shifts onto Yaruq himself. He went to Imperial College London on a Commonwealth scholarship to do a master’s in innovation, entrepreneurship and management. He is candid about how the choice was made. He had taken the test casually while already working a first job after LUMS, scored well, and then used the QS rankings rather than his own research — “if they have already done the ranking for me, why do I need to do my whole research?” — to pick the top three universities offering the degree.

What Imperial actually changed, in his telling, is the benchmark. He walked into a class with students from roughly thirty to forty countries and watched his pre-existing assumptions about other nationalities break in real time. He also watched the quality of teaching itself, and he is willing to compare it directly to home. “If I am in the best university in Pakistan, I get the best faculty for Pakistan. In the UK, I am getting the best faculty in the world, and I can see it in the content.” He admits that as a student at LUMS, he was the kind who would disengage if the teacher could not hold him. At Imperial he never disengaged.

He singles out one project as the moment the methodology landed for him. The brief, for a design thinking course, was to design a museum experience for a blind visitor. His diverse group ran the exercise on him personally — they blindfolded him, walked him through the building, and used his feedback to build the solution. When he later joined NSTP and started designing programmes himself, that exercise came back. “All of that came back to my head — it has to be like this. Experiential learning has to be designed like this.”

The scholarship paperwork, and the visa that nearly killed it

The closing section is a small piece of practical reporting that will matter to any Pakistani student listening. The Commonwealth, Chevening and GREAT scholarships are still funding Pakistanis through top UK universities. The test is competitive, partly because it is graded on a curve against a domestic applicant pool. Yaruq cleared the test, was shortlisted on his application, and only then began the separate university admissions process — which, he is careful to point out, is fully independent of the scholarship.

What followed was a near-miss. His scholarship body would not process a lower preference until the higher ones were rejected. He let his Edinburgh and UCL offers lapse waiting for Imperial. When Imperial finally cleared, a communication gap with the awarding body delayed his visa application to a week before term started. The university extended his start date once. They extended it a second time. They then drew a hard line: arrive on campus by noon on Monday or lose the place. Credit, he says, to his father, who suggested a same-day check on the embassy system the visa came through with hours to spare.

The financial package, on his recollection, was around £1,200 per month in 2015 — enough to cover rent, food and travel, with savings left over for a small Euro trip and a weekend in Scotland. He had the option to work up to twenty hours per week and did not need to. “I thought I should make the most of my learning experience and then explore the UK and the surroundings.”

By the end of the conversation, the through-line is clear. The thing NSTP is selling is not real estate. It is a structured environment that pushes founders past the place where Pakistani startups historically die — the moment of first contact with a customer — and a set of relationships, local and international, that the founder would otherwise spend years building alone.