Why one of Austin’s top AI founders says he is ‘incredibly long Pakistan’

Amir Husain, who sits on the advisory boards of LUMS and AAASE, says the numbers show Pakistan’s moment has arrived. His answers on what it takes to build here are more revealing.

Having lived in Austin for 30 years, Amir Husain says, “I look at myself as a bit of a global citizen, and I can be where I need to be.” The founder of SparkCognition, the AI company now called Avathon that reached a unicorn valuation under his leadership, was recently appointed to the University Advisory Board of the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and, last month, to the first Industrial Advisory Board of the Asian American Academy of Sciences and Engineering (AAASE).

LUMS’s announcement quoted him saying: “Pakistan’s time on the global stage has arrived.”

Asked in an interview with Business Recorder what he was seeing that made him say so, his answer was not sentiment. “To be unemotional and very cold about it,” he said, “the numbers make me say that.”

The numbers

He started with the stock market. “The day I left Pakistan on the August 10 in 1996, the KSE Index was around the 1,200 points, plus or minus a few points,” he said. “Now, the KSE-100 could cross the 200,000-point mark in the near future.”

Adjusted for the rupee’s fall and measured against the S&P 500 with dividends, he said, the Pakistani market “has met or exceeded” the US index, “depending on the day you do the measurement.”

Husain believes the government should be highlighting this achievement as a significant demonstration of economic resilience.

“The fact that the market reached this milestone despite years of security challenges, political assassinations, changes in government and devastating floods makes it even more noteworthy. It offers a tangible, numerical measure of the country’s resilience.”

The second pillar is energy, which he called one of the country’s biggest structural problems because it drives imports, borrowing and balance-of-payments crises.

“Around 25% of all the electricity produced in Pakistan last year came from solar sources,” he said, adding that, aside from the whole of Europe, Pakistan is “the second largest importer of Chinese panels.”

Business Recorder recently reported that solar made up about 20% of generation in 2025, while other estimates that count rooftop systems put it higher.

The third is industry. “There are about 30 companies now assembling vehicles in Pakistan,” he said, with aviation exports under way and batteries next. None of it, he argued, depends on who is in government: “These are all things that are happening organically… that is the structural lift that I believe Pakistan is achieving.” His conclusion: “I am incredibly long Pakistan.”

Recognition that pays

Asked what it would take for Pakistan to be recognised the way the US is, Husain separated two kinds: recognition “for self-satisfaction” and recognition “that actually leads to benefits for the country.” He put credit ratings, bond pricing and Pakistan’s Panda bond issue in the second category, saying Pakistan had been doing well on them.

His recommendation was to fix the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) figures. “Pakistan today has a $420-$430 million GDP,” he said, suggesting that the undocumented economy ran from 45 to 80%. Adding a median estimate, he further said, “You [Pakistan] could be sitting at a $750 to $900 billion economy.”

Also read: Pakistan’s GDP grows 3.65% in FY2026, economy size reaches $450bn: NAC

The stakes are practical. Some investment funds have minimum economy-size rules, so “with the correct numbers, Pakistan qualifies for inbound foreign capital that you would otherwise not qualify for”, according to Husain.

He said India had done better by documenting its economy, though he also cited Indian research arguing that India’s own estimates were inflated. Husain said his figures drew on the World Bank, Pakistan’s finance minister and a Turkish academic study of household spending.

‘I don’t believe in brain drain’

Asked whether brain drain was the right frame for Pakistan, he rejected that. “Your brain is contributing to Pakistan right now as we speak,” the AI expert maintained, who was also speaking from outside the country. “My brain is contributing to Pakistan as we speak.”

What had to change, he said, was that “capital needs to flow”.

“Pakistanis abroad should invest at home the way Indians abroad have, on merit.”

Husain said he was an investor in Pakistan’s bonds, which he called “the best bond on the market, in my opinion.” It is “not just because I love Pakistan,” he said, but because he saw a strong return. His message to Pakistanis abroad: “Global opportunities, but don’t forget where you came from.”

What it takes to build here

On what Pakistani founders get wrong when they pitch, he said the success rate of startups was low everywhere, and that Pakistan’s advantage was cost. “It’s very low cost to actually get things going and to get to a product-market fit conclusion.”

The AI expert wants founders to think global-first.

“Pakistani founders replicated models like Uber and DoorDash locally but really weren’t able to reverse that out of Pakistan and go elsewhere.”

With AI, he continued, the country should “seriously look at the services industry” and ask whether clients will keep hiring developers for contract work “given that AI can do a lot of that work, perhaps for less and quicker.”

He said Pakistan needed products and brands. “There are very few Pakistani brands that are known globally.”

When asked what would need to change for someone with his ability to build SparkCognition in Lahore, Husain said it would not look like SparkCognition at all, because “companies are built around ecosystems”. What Pakistan has is a “large base of industrial equipment that could be modernised with sensor and AI layers, and that is a real market.”

His advice to a LUMS computer science student started with who pays: “Build for a customer who will pay you in dollars, from day one, even if that customer is abroad.” The first obstacle is distribution. “A UT student can write to a Fortune 500 executive through the alumni network and get a meeting because the whole ecosystem vouches for them implicitly. A LUMS student with the same product has a narrower set of such people to draw on, because fewer LUMS graduates in the US or Europe occupy those roles today. That will change over time.”

What he is doing, concretely

Husain describes his LUMS role as “an advisory role, so it’s about opening doors and helping with strategy rather than running anything directly.” He gives input to senior leadership on “strategy, programmes, research initiatives and partnerships,” and helps individual professors with “a connection, a problem worth working on or a bit of equipment.” The value a board member adds, he said, was “perspective and access.”

Asked whether the machine learning lab he and his wife Zaib endowed at UT Austin had a Pakistani equivalent in the works, Husain said the country’s need was different. That gift was followed by $25 million from the National Science Foundation, he said. “What the country can benefit from right now is AI implementation and adoption.”

He encouraged Pakistani companies to deploy AI and give students the hands-on experience, suggesting “AI research in Pakistan might be best pursued in the context of a commercial lab. And more on this soon.”

And then, on whether WorldQuant Foundry or Global Venture Bridge had backed a Pakistani company or founder, he answered yes, pointing to a founding CEO in the Foundry’s portfolio who was a veteran of the US oil and gas industry and “an American of Pakistani origin.”

He also spoke about MinusFifteen, the project founded by Zaib Husain that aims to cut Lahore’s average summer temperature by 15°F over a decade. The target, he said, “didn’t come from aspiration” but from research in Spain showing a gap of up to 15° between hot asphalt and shaded green space.

The project’s sensors in Lahore have found differences of “five, six, seven degrees” between areas. Participants earn M15 tokens for planting trees or hosting sensors.

Husain said the token was “best thought of as a rewards programme, not a financial instrument,” an experiment in letting participants redeem credit for partner-contributed benefits. It is “not existential to the project”.

Robots, classrooms and defence

On AI in education, he said technology was “ultimately patient” and useful as a tutor but warned against replacing human interaction. “If anybody tells you they’ve figured out how AI fits into the future of education, no, no one has.”

Asked how Argon Mechatronics, his robotics company, squares with Pakistan’s cheap-labour manufacturing, he answered more generally. “There are a huge number of jobs in the world that humans should not do,” he said, citing virology labs, nuclear accidents and bomb disposal, and suggesting governments could “pay dividends from the efficiencies” of automation.

He did not address how Pakistani manufacturers should respond.

On his NATO, Council on Foreign Relations and CNAS roles, and the complexity of Pakistan’s ties to Western defence technology, Husain said such bodies were for exchanging views. “My role is not to pick up a gun… My role is to discuss things.”

What the answers leave open

Husain makes a coherent macro case for Pakistan, and he is direct that the country’s founders started with a networking disadvantage. Husain said he does “a lot of business with Pakistan” and expects that to grow, though the interview did not establish exactly what kind.

On his own commitments, the answers described tests rather than plans. Asked what it would take for him to commit capital, time or a company’s resources to something in Pakistan, he listed criteria: whether he wants to work with the people, whether they are committed to a mission he believes in, whether they are competent and realistic, and whether the project can scale.

It boils down, he said, to “alignment of mission, the quality of the human beings and doing big things that can make a substantial economic impact.” If capital is to flow home, as he argued it should, “more on this soon” is the line to watch.