A Pakistani startup has taken a top honour in Silicon Valley. RLabs won the GOAL Startup Award at Plug and Play’s November Summit in California, where it was one of just 18 startups from around the world selected to pitch under the Global Overseas Acceleration and Learning programme, known as GOAL.
The summit is one of the biggest gatherings in Plug and Play’s calendar, drawing more than 3,000 participants and over 300 startups across more than 20 industry programmes, with artificial intelligence and deep technology as the running themes. Against that field, the award went to a young company from Islamabad that teaches people, and increasingly machines, how to operate complex machinery.
What the GOAL Startup Award Recognises
RLabs builds extended reality (XR) simulators, synthetic data and machine training systems. Its virtual environments let trainees practise on complex machinery safely, cheaply and as many times as they need, without risking equipment or lives. The same simulations then generate synthetic data, the realistic practice material that artificial intelligence systems need in order to learn.
The company is preparing to launch in the United States market, and the GOAL Startup Award gives it a Silicon Valley stage at exactly the right moment. One point is worth stating plainly, because award stories often blur it: the honour is a recognition award. No investment amount was announced with it, and no report of the summit claims one.
Plug and Play, headquartered in Sunnyvale, is one of the world’s best known startup accelerators and early stage investors, and its GOAL programme exists to bring promising overseas startups into the Silicon Valley ecosystem. For a Pakistani company working in aerospace grade simulation, a field where buyers are cautious and credentials matter, being selected to pitch at all was a mark of standing. Winning made it a headline.
Extended reality training lets operators practise on virtual machinery before touching the real thing (file photo)
Photo: InclusiveGameLab, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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Built at NICAT by a NUST Graduate
RLabs is led by Harris Ahmed (the spelling used by SoonTimes and PakTechStan in their reports of the award), a 2018 graduate of the National University of Sciences and Technology in Islamabad who has spent a decade developing extended reality training for people who operate complex machinery. His pitch in California drew on that experience: the human expertise built up over years of teaching operators is now being used to train machines as well.
The startup is incubated at the National Incubation Centre for Aerospace Technologies, known as NICAT, Pakistan’s specialist incubator for aerospace and deep technology startups. NICAT says RLabs is developing its own large language model to support a modular, cross-platform simulation engine. The incubator estimates the engine could reduce development time by up to 75 percent. That figure is the company’s and the incubator’s estimate for a product still being built, not a proven result, but it shows the scale of the ambition behind the pitch that won in California.
A Proud Moment for Pakistan’s Tech Scene
Information Technology Minister Shaza Fatima Khawaja congratulated the RLabs team, calling the GOAL Startup Award win a proud moment for Pakistan and crediting the support of her ministry and Ignite, the national technology fund that backs the country’s startup ecosystem.
The honour lands in a strong year for the sector. Pakistan’s IT exports reached a record $4.6 billion in FY2025-26, and Pakistani founders are increasingly winning places, and prizes, on global stages rather than only serving foreign clients from home. A simulation company incubated in an aerospace technology centre and decorated in Silicon Valley is a good example of how the ecosystem is broadening beyond software services. More of these stories are collected on our Pakistani Startups and Business Success page.
Sources
- SoonTimes
- PakTechStan
- Pakistan Point
- National Incubation Centre for Aerospace Technologies (NICAT)
- Featured image: A person wearing a virtual reality headset, immersed in an extended reality simulation (file photo) (InclusiveGameLab, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
- In-body image: A virtual reality user interacting with a simulation through a headset and hand controls (file photo) (InclusiveGameLab, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Umar Farooq is the founder and editor of Good News Pakistan. An engineer by profession and a writer by passion, he started the site in December 2022 to share good news from Pakistan, and has since written and edited more than 200 articles about its people, sports, science, business and world records. He believes the story of Pakistan is bigger than its headlines, and that good news, told honestly, is worth telling every day.