Building AI Products from Karachi: My Story

This one is personal rather than a how-to. People sometimes assume serious AI products only come out of Silicon Valley or a handful of European hubs. I build them from Karachi, and the story of how that happened says something about what is possible from here, so I want to tell it plainly.

It started with backend engineering

I did not begin with AI. I began with backend systems, building scalable Node.js and Express APIs, real-time WebSockets, and message queues at VativeApps. That work taught me the discipline that still defines everything I build: reliable systems that hold up under real traffic, not code that only looks good in a demo. AI engineering, it turns out, rewards that discipline more than anything.

The turn toward AI systems

At Cubitrek I moved from full-stack development into agentic AI engineering over a single intense year, building autonomous workflows in Python that ran multi-step business tasks on their own. That was where I saw clearly that the interesting frontier was not another chatbot, but systems that could plan, use tools, and finish real work. From Karachi, with a laptop and a good internet connection, I was building the same class of systems being built anywhere.

Shipping my own products

Then I started building products of my own. WatBot, a WhatsApp AI automation platform with a core engine written in Go. selfbrand AI, a SaaS that automates most of the work of personal branding using LLMs. Asmara.AI, an AI-native automation product. Founding products changes how you engineer, because you feel every shortcut and every flaky pipeline yourself, which pushes you to care about reliability in a way client work alone never quite does.

Working with the world from here

Today I also work as a full-stack AI engineer at MindKeepr in Tallinn, Estonia, building agentic pipelines with retrieval, while based in Karachi. That is the part worth underlining: the work is global, the location is local, and the two are no longer in tension. The internet flattened the map for this kind of engineering, and Karachi is as valid a place to build from as anywhere.

Why this matters

I tell this story because talent here often underestimates what is reachable. You do not need to be somewhere else to build serious AI products. You need the engineering discipline, the willingness to ship and learn, and the patience to make systems that actually work. The map matters far less than it used to.

If you are building AI from Pakistan and want to compare notes, or you are a company that wants to work with someone who builds from here, I am easy to reach. I am always glad to talk with people doing real work.