How a Karachi workshop found buyers for a two thousand dollar bionic arm
Bioniks has no venture round to its name. It grew on sales, donors, government orders and prizes, and in 2026 it is leaning on an oil company to reach patients who cannot pay.
Bioniks launched in March 2016 out of a final year mechatronics project at SZABIST in Karachi, with Ovais Hussain Qureshi as chief executive and Anas Niaz as chief technology officer. Its first customer was not a customer at all. A father asked the two graduates for a working hand for his five year old son, and the first ten arms the company made were given away, Gulf News reported in 2019. By then it had built arms for more than 35 people, including patients in the UAE, the United States and Bangladesh, and was charging about 200,000 rupees, or 2,000 dollars.
The product is a 3D printed upper limb prosthesis controlled by myoelectric sensors that pick up signals from the muscles left in the user's residual limb. Users scan their stump with a smartphone app, the arm is printed and assembled in Karachi, and a companion app lets technicians troubleshoot over Bluetooth. Bioniks says its devices carry ISO 9001, ISO 13485 and CE marking.
Donors first, then the state
Money was the constant problem. Qureshi told Dawn in 2019 that local venture capitalists demanded unreasonable stakes for the sums they offered, and the company was pitching for about 50,000 dollars at a conference in the Netherlands. Instead of equity, Bioniks built a hybrid model. Paying customers subsidise the rest, and a welfare foundation raises donations for those who cannot pay. Geo News reported in October 2023 that around 80 per cent of recipients got their arms free, that the Sindh government had bought 50 arms, and that the Pakistan Institute of Prosthetic and Orthotic Sciences had signed up for 100 more, mainly for victims of terrorism. The company said it had fitted 600 arms by then, with about 1,000 people on a waiting list.
“The venture capitals here have quite unreasonable demands in terms of the stake required vis a vis amount offered.”
Prizes filled some of the gap: Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia in 2023, the ITU's Robotics for Good competition in February 2024, the Zero Project Award in March 2025. The Zero Project's own write up records that staff grew from 15 to 50 and that 700 prosthetics had been sold by mid 2024, funded by sales, grants and private investment. No funding round has been publicly disclosed.
Exporting the arm, not the factory
In January 2025 the company announced what it called a mobile AI powered limb factory for Gaza. What actually shipped, in July 2025, was more modest and more telling: two children's arms delivered in Amman, designed remotely from phone scans and funded by a Jordanian clinic and by Pakistani donors. Niaz told Reuters that each arm cost about 2,500 dollars and that Bioniks had fitted more than 1,000 arms in Pakistan since 2021. He called the Gaza cases a test case and said the company wanted to work in other conflict zones.
The year since has been about partnerships rather than capital. A pilot with UN Women, run under its Innovative Grants Programme, fits arms on rural Sindhi women injured by fodder cutters, a common cause of hand and arm amputation in the countryside, according to an Australia Awards Pakistan account of the project. In February 2026 the company launched a programme with Pakistan State Oil's CSR Trust at PSO House in Karachi; Niaz said more than 100 people had already received limbs through it. The company now says it has served users in 11 countries, has added a lower limb product, the Titan Leg, and plans to expand into the Gulf through hospital partnerships, Pakistan Gulf Economist reported in February 2026. Its claim, repeated in Pakistani press in August and September 2026, to rank among the top ten prosthetics companies in the world names no ranking body and should be read as marketing.
