ChipXPRT Secures PKR 50 Million Seed Investment from Matracon in Landmark Deal for Pakistan’s Chip Industry
Islamabad: ChipXPRT, a spin-off from NUST’s School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (SEECS), has secured a PKR 50 million seed investment from Matracon Pakistan Private Limited — one of the most significant early-stage bets on a Pakistani semiconductor venture to date, and a signal that local investors are waking up to the chip design opportunity.
The announcement was made on 20 October 2026, with a signing ceremony held at the National Science & Technology Park (NSTP) at NUST in Islamabad. The event was attended by the Principal and senior representatives of NUST SEECS along with Senator Abdul Qadir, Member of the Senate, underlining the growing policy-level interest in Pakistan’s deep-tech ecosystem.
ChipXPRT has set out a bold mission: to deliver cutting-edge chip design solutions and drive innovation in the semiconductor industry from Pakistan. The company says the partnership with Matracon brings it closer to pushing the boundaries of technology and making a real impact with top-tier chip designs.
What ChipXPRT Does: RISC-V Cores and Secure Chip Design
According to the company’s own profile, ChipXPRT works on future-ready chip architecture — PQC-capable RISC-V cores with hardware-rooted secure boot, tamper resistance and cryptographic acceleration for trusted firmware execution. In plain terms, it designs the processor brains that power everything from IoT devices to industrial systems, with a strong emphasis on security at the hardware level.
RISC-V is the open-source chip architecture that has become the industry’s great leveller: unlike proprietary architectures, it allows new companies to design processors without paying heavy licensing fees. For a Pakistani startup like ChipXPRT, that open standard is a strategic choice — it lowers the barrier to entry in one of the world’s most capital-intensive industries.
The company operates from three locations: a headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; a Pakistan office at NSTP, NUST, Sector H-12, Islamabad; and a US office in Fort Collins, Colorado — a footprint that positions it to sell chip design services to clients in the Gulf, Pakistan and North America.
Why the ChipXPRT Seed Investment Matters for Pakistan
The PKR 50 million seed investment in ChipXPRT lands at a moment when semiconductors have become the most strategic commodity on the planet. Global chip shortages in recent years exposed how completely modern economies depend on a handful of suppliers — and how countries without domestic chip capabilities are at the mercy of supply chains they do not control.
Pakistan has long been a consumer of chips rather than a designer or producer of them. Every smartphone, car, telecom tower and server in the country runs on imported silicon. The government has already recognised the gap: under the Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP) 2023-24, Rs190 million was allocated to establish a chip design centre at NUST itself, explicitly to encourage the design of electronic chips and reduce reliance on imported chips.
Against that backdrop, a private-sector seed round of PKR 50 million into a NUST spin-off doing actual chip design work is more than a routine startup funding story. It is a vote of confidence by Matracon Pakistan Private Limited in the idea that Pakistani engineers can design silicon that competes internationally — and that investors should put money behind that belief.
Matracon’s Bet on NUST’s Deep-Tech Pipeline
For Matracon Pakistan Private Limited, the investment buys a front-row seat in one of the hardest and highest-value areas of technology. Chip design startups are rare in Pakistan’s startup scene, which has historically favoured fintech, e-commerce and logistics plays. A semiconductor spin-off emerging from SEECS — one of Pakistan’s strongest engineering schools — represents exactly the kind of deep-tech pipeline that university research parks like NSTP were built to commercialise.
The signing ceremony’s venue — the National Science & Technology Park at NUST — was no accident. NSTP is the bridge between university research and industry, and ChipXPRT’s journey from a SEECS spin-off to a funded company headquartered across three countries is a showcase of what that bridge is supposed to deliver.
The presence of Senator Abdul Qadir at the ceremony also signals that the deal has caught the attention of policymakers. Pakistan’s IT and telecom leadership has repeatedly spoken about moving the country up the technology value chain — from exporting software services to designing hardware — and seed investments like the ChipXPRT seed round are the first concrete steps in that direction.
Pakistan’s Semiconductor Ambitions: A Long Road Ahead
Nobody should mistake one seed round for a chip industry. Designing a competitive processor takes years of engineering, expensive design tools and fabrication partnerships with foundries — none of which exist at scale in Pakistan today. ChipXPRT’s own multi-country structure suggests its commercial work will lean on global fabrication and client networks.
But the trajectory matters. Taiwan, South Korea and China all began their semiconductor journeys with small, seemingly modest investments in local design capability. What ChipXPRT and Matracon have demonstrated is that the talent pipeline — trained at institutions like NUST SEECS — is ready, and that Pakistani capital is starting to follow it.
For Pakistan’s tech sector, which already generates billions of dollars in software exports, adding a chip design success story would be a powerful proof point. The PKR 50 million seed investment in ChipXPRT may one day be remembered as the round that started it — or as a footnote. Either way, the industry will be watching what this NUST spin-off designs next.
Sources: NUST SEECS; ChipXPRT
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