Every year, Forbes releases its 30 under 30 list of the brightest young entrepreneurs, leaders and stars below the age of thirty, as the name suggests. For its list of 2021 of the North America region, 4 Pakistanis have made the list.
These individuals have been included in the list for their contributions in different categories from education to marketing and advertising, and gaming. Some of the previous Pakistanis to have been added in the list are Malala Yousufzai and Khalida Brohi in 2014 as social entrepreneurs. Singer Momina Mustehsan also made the Asia list in 2018.
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The four brightest individuals and their contributions are as follows;
Asad Malik
Malik moved to then US in 2016, where he founded Jadu AR, a Los Angeles based Augmented Reality (AR) startup for storytelling that turns TikTok stars and musicians into holograms.
His project “Terminal 3” was a breakout success and featured young Muslim immigrants. Malik also collaborated with Magic Leap, another startup of wearable spatial computer that brings the physical and digital worlds together as one, on a project called “A Jester’s Tale” that explored the personification of AI.
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Malik is now working with Verizon on educational AR experiences with 5G.
Danish Dhamani
Danish grew up in East Africa and was always shy of speaking in classroom presentations and job interviews after moving to the US. This prompted him to launch Oral AI or Orai, a philadelphia based, speech coaching app in 2017 with his university classmates, Aasim Sani (COO) and Paritosh Gupta (CTO) at Drexel University.
Orai lets users record themselves speaking and receive feedback such as how many times they say “um.”
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The startup raised $2.3 million in seed funding since and its corporate clients include clients including Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Comcast and IBM, along with 5,000 other active users.
Faizan Bhatti
Bhatty cofounded Halo Cars in 2019 while studying at the University of Pennsylvania with Kenan Saleh.
The startup was a way to create new ad space on rideshare vehicles so that Uber and Lyft drivers could earn more money with smart digital screens atop cars enabling the display of hyper-targeted ads.
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The company raised $500,000 from angel investors after its launch and was sold to Lyft, within a year of its inception.
Sanaa Khan
Sanaa made the list in the games category. She is a program manager at Google where she oversees the marketing strategy and hardware planning for Stadia, the tech giant’s cloud gaming service.
Khan initiated Stadia’s Free Play Days, during the Coronovirus pandemic for financially constrained gamers. She also drives a scholarship program for women developers.