Anas Niaz did not set out to run a prosthetics company. In 2016 he and his classmate Ovais Hussain Qureshi were finishing mechatronics degrees at SZABIST in Karachi, and a robotic arm was one of the pieces in their final semester project. Today Niaz is chief executive of Bioniks, a Karachi social enterprise that designs and 3D prints myoelectric bionic arms, and more recently legs, for amputees and people born with limb differences.
The company sells its devices at a fraction of the price of imported ones and matches patients who cannot pay with donors, corporate sponsors and provincial governments. Its arms are made from scans of the user's residual limb and read the electrical signals from the muscles that remain in the stump to open and close the fingers.
The story matters because it joins two things Pakistan is usually told it lacks: a domestic medical device industry and a way of getting advanced technology to people who cannot afford it. Niaz was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list in 2023, and in 2025 Bioniks became the first Pakistani startup to win the Zero Project Award.
A father at the door in 2016
The company began with a request. A father, Omer Baloch, came looking for a working artificial hand for his five year old son, Mir Bayyan, who had been born without a right forearm. Dawn reported in June 2019 that Niaz and Qureshi built it, and that Bayyan became the first Pakistani child to receive a 3D printed prosthetic arm. The founders launched in March 2016, funded by themselves, and the first design, an Iron Man theme, was a hit with the boy.
“Robotic arm was one of the products during our final semester project.”
That origin explains the company's character. It started as a piece of coursework that met a real person, and it kept the habits of a student project: build something that works, test it on the person who needs it, and fix what fails.
From Nawabshah to a design studio
Niaz was born and raised in Nawabshah in interior Sindh. According to a profile in The Friday Times in February 2024, he was a school debater. Before Bioniks he spent three years hosting a radio show and, while still a student, launched a product design company, Viscous.co.
He studied mechatronics, robotics and automation at SZABIST. It is an unusual combination of experience for a founder in medical devices: a broadcaster's comfort with speaking to an audience, a designer's interest in how a product looks and feels, and an engineer's training in how it moves. The product carries the engineering, and the radio years may explain why he has proved an effective spokesman for it.
How an arm is made
Dawn's 2019 profile explained the principle. A mechanical prosthetic needs force from the remaining limb, while a bionic one is driven by signals from the muscles, so no surgery is needed. Qureshi told the paper the arm weighed 500 to 600 grams, against one to two kilograms for a typical mechanical one, and that making, testing and delivering a custom arm took about three days after measurement.
By 2024 the process had moved onto a phone. The ITU, which runs the AI for Good summit, described a mobile app that takes a three dimensional scan of the residual limb, sweat and water proof sensors, frames of carbon fibre and aircraft aluminium, and Bluetooth for remote troubleshooting. Arms were offered from the age of three and a half, the ITU said, to users in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
A tenth of the price
The number that made Bioniks newsworthy was the price. Dawn put an arm at Rs200,000 in 2019, and Gulf News at about $2,000, when imported bionic arms ran from $5,000 to $50,000. In a country like Pakistan, Niaz told Gulf News, even $2,000 is a huge amount, so the company's early arms went to users free of charge. It has since matched patients with donors, corporate sponsors and provincial governments.
By 2025 Niaz was quoting Reuters a figure of roughly $2,500 per arm, against $10,000 to $20,000 for American made alternatives. The gap with imports remains wide, but the figures show the cost creeping up over six years, and the company still depends on charity and sponsorship to reach most of its users. Both numbers are the company's own.
The youngest wearer and the themed arms
In August 2021 the company fitted a multi grip arm on Mohammed Sideeq, a four year old from Karachi. Niaz told Arab News that no one in the world had made a bionic arm for someone so young. That is the company's claim and has not been independently checked.
Themed arms followed, among them Iron Man and Elsa. They look like a marketing trick, and in part they are, but they answer a real problem in paediatric prosthetics. A child who is asked to wear a device every day is more likely to do so if it is something other children envy rather than stare at. Niaz told Reuters that children also outgrow their limbs, so replacements are needed every 12 to 18 months, and that the company hoped to reuse most components when it makes them.
Prizes, and a change of title
Forbes put Niaz, then 29, on its 30 Under 30 Asia list for social impact in May 2023. In February 2024 Bioniks took first prize at the ITU's Robotics for Good Innovation Factory, judged on 20 February. In March 2025 he accepted the Zero Project Award in Vienna, one of 77 winners from 522 nominations and the first for a Pakistani startup, telling Arab News that the company's mission was to change the way technology serves the disabled community.
His title has shifted over the years. In 2019 Dawn and Gulf News described him as chief technology officer with Qureshi as chief executive. The Friday Times called him chief visionary officer in early 2024. Since the Zero Project Award, Arab News, Reuters and The News have all identified him as chief executive, and Qureshi no longer appears on the company's team page. The magazine has not found a published account of when or why the roles changed.
From Karachi to Amman
In July 2025 Niaz flew to Amman to make Bioniks' first delivery outside Pakistan: arms for Sidra Al Bordeeni, eight, who lost hers in a missile strike while sheltering at a school in Gaza, and for three year old Habebat Allah, who lost both arms and a leg. Sidra's arm was funded by the Mafaz Clinic in Amman, whose chief executive, Entesar Asaker, said it chose Bioniks for its low costs and ability to troubleshoot remotely. Donations from Pakistan paid for Habebat's. The fittings were done largely by remote consultation, according to the report that Dawn carried.
Niaz said the delivery was a test case and that the company planned to speed up, serve other conflict zones, Ukraine included, and become a global company. Funding, he admitted, remained the roadblock. That candour is useful. A bionic arm is a one off, custom fitted object, and every one that leaves a clinic needs a donor or a sponsor behind it.
The next decade of the arm
The evidence of scale is mixed. The Friday Times interviewer spoke of more than 500 people helped, Arab News of 700 prosthetics sold by 2024, and Dawn quoted more than 1,000 custom arms fitted in Pakistan since 2021. These are not the same measure, and none is audited. In February 2026 Niaz said that more than 100 people had received prosthetic limbs through a joint programme with Pakistan State Oil's CSR Trust, launched at PSO House in Karachi.
The questions ahead are the ordinary hard ones for a hardware social enterprise: whether sponsorship can grow as fast as demand, whether remote fitting can match the quality of an in person one, and whether the company can build legs and leg sockets as well as it has built arms. Niaz himself lists scarce components, import bureaucracy, few grants and local investors, and a regulatory environment unfriendly to hardware startups. What he has already shown is that a final semester project can become a product that children actually wear.
