Pakistani founders Kleiner Perkins, three words that few would have predicted in 2012, when a young man from Okara applied to the world’s most selective startup accelerator and got a rejection email. Waqas Ali and Sidra Qasim went on to prove that where you start does not decide where you finish. Starting from a small agricultural town southwest of Lahore, they built two companies, survived a near-quit moment, and ended up backed by some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley.
From Okara to a Panchayat to a Shoe Business
Okara is an agricultural town southwest of Lahore. Around 2010, Waqas Ali was a college student with a passion for technology and social media, running a small social media company before he even owned his own computer. At a local village council meeting, he met a shoemaker named Muhammad Hussain and pitched the idea of selling shoes online. Waqas brought up the idea of selling shoes online but it did not particularly appeal to Hussain, who thought people want to touch, smell, wear, and feel shoes before buying them.
Despite the pushback, the idea stuck. The initial funding was a $10,000 prize Waqas won in a competition for startups sponsored by a Google-backed grant program for Pakistani entrepreneurs. The company was first called Hometown. In 2014, the company was rebranded as Markhor, named after a wild goat which is Pakistan’s national animal.
For roughly a year, Markhor sold leather shoes online. Slowly. About 50 pairs a month. This is the part of the story that gets skipped in most retellings, the year where nothing dramatic happens. No funding announcement. No accelerator acceptance. Just two people in Lahore, selling handmade shoes, one order at a time, while figuring out how to run a business neither of them had any formal training to run.
The YC Rejection and the Kickstarter That Changed Everything
They applied to Y Combinator twice, first rejected in 2012, then accepted in 2015. Between those two attempts, they ran a Kickstarter campaign with a $15,000 goal. The campaign went live on a Monday night. By the time Waqas and Sidra woke up Tuesday morning, they had already hit their $15,000 goal. The Kickstarter campaign eventually raised $107,000.
They came from rural Pakistan and made it onto a Kickstarter that reached 508 backers in 32 countries. That global traction gave them the proof of momentum that Y Combinator looks for. When they applied again in 2015, the answer was different. Waqas Ali and Sidra Qasim, a husband and wife team running a leather shoe company out of a small Pakistani town, became the first Pakistani company based in Pakistan to ever get into Y Combinator.
The Moment They Almost Quit Inside YC
Getting into YC was not the end of the hard part. It was the middle of it. Struggling with just three months of runway left, they faced a crucial moment. “I was imagining I’m going to go back to my hometown and my life is over,” Sidra shares.
Most versions of this story skip this part. The truth is that even inside one of the best accelerators on the planet, the founders nearly gave up. Instead of giving up, they went back to basics, asking themselves fundamental questions about their purpose and passion. Their research led them to a surprising insight, people were buying running shoes for everyday wear, but the construction was not optimised for walking and standing. This revelation led to the birth of Atoms, a shoe company focused on creating the ideal everyday footwear.
How Pakistani Founders Kleiner Perkins Became a Reality
The pivot to Atoms changed everything. Atoms, the creators of the world’s first shoe to come in quarter sizes, announced an $8.1 million Series A fundraising round. The Series A round was led by Initialized Capital, the investment firm started by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and Garry Tan. Additional investors included Kleiner Perkins, Dollar Shave Club CEO Michael Dubin, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, TED curator Chris Anderson, and the rapper Chamillionaire.
Vogue called them “the most thoughtfully designed sneakers ever.” After building a waitlist of more than 39,000 people, Atoms launched to the public in June 2019.
What made those investors say yes? Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian had first encountered Atoms and its co-founders as mentors, when Sidra and Waqas were going through Y Combinator with Markhor. The mentor relationship built during those three intense months in San Francisco became the relationship that led an investor to back their next company, years later. You can read more about Atoms directly on their website.
This is the detail that most coverage misses: the Kleiner Perkins cheque did not come from a cold pitch. It came from trust built slowly, across years, through real work done inside a three-month accelerator program. The lesson for Pakistani founders is not just “apply to YC.” It is: show up seriously, build real relationships, and let the work do the talking.
What This Story Means for Founders in Pakistan Right Now
The Markhor and Atoms journey is not just inspiration content. It carries practical signals for any Pakistani founder thinking about global capital. YC is a startup accelerator based in San Francisco. Since 2005, it has funded over 5,000 companies, including Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, DoorDash, and Reddit. Every company it accepts gets $500,000 in exchange for 7% equity, plus three months of intensive mentorship and access to one of the most powerful alumni networks in the world.
The acceptance rate? Under 1%. More selective than Harvard. And yes, it is open to founders from anywhere in the world.
Since Markhor cracked that door open in 2015, more Pakistani teams have followed. Umer Adnan took Cowlar, a smart collar for cows built in Pakistan, into YC Winter 2017 and made it to the top 7 at Demo Day. In Winter 2022, four Pakistani startups got in at once: Elphinstone, Mahaana Wealth, Rider, and Markaz. Each of those teams had the Markhor story as proof that the door was real.
Pakistan’s startup funding environment at home remains tight. Pakistan-based startups raised between $36.6 million and $74.23 million across all of 2025. That gap between local capital and global capital is exactly why understanding how to reach investors like Kleiner Perkins matters so much. The path Waqas and Sidra took, build real traction, run a Kickstarter, apply to YC, build relationships during the programme, then launch a second company, is replicable. It is not easy, but it is real. You can also read about Pakistan Startup Fund Phase 2, which is another route opening up for early-stage founders inside the country.
In 2026, the door is exactly where they left it. The YC application asks the same questions. The bar is the same bar, not perfection, but proof of momentum. What is different is that Pakistani founders now have living evidence that the door opens for them too.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who are Waqas Ali and Sidra Qasim?
Waqas Ali and Sidra Qasim are Pakistani co-founders from Okara who built Markhor, the first Pakistani company based in Pakistan to be accepted into Y Combinator, and then went on to found Atoms, a sneaker brand backed by Kleiner Perkins and other top Silicon Valley investors.
What is Atoms and how much did it raise?
Atoms, the creators of the world’s first shoe to come in quarter sizes, raised an $8.1 million Series A round. This brought their total investment to $8.6 million after an earlier $560,000 seed round.
Were they actually backed by Kleiner Perkins?
Yes. Qasim and Ali co-founded Atoms, which raised more than $8 million in funding from investors including Alexis Ohanian’s Initialized Capital, Shrug Capital, and Kleiner Perkins. Kleiner Perkins is one of Silicon Valley’s oldest and most respected venture capital firms.
Can Pakistani founders apply to Y Combinator today?
Yes. YC is open to founders from any country. Pakistani teams have been accepted multiple times since 2015. The key things YC looks for are a strong founding team, a real problem, and evidence of early traction, not where you are from or what university you attended.