I Stood in Front of Pakistan's Drug Regulator. Behind Me Was a Team That Had Spent Months Getting Ready.
Med Dev Insight Hub set out to connect Pakistan's fragmented medical device industry. This is the story of the founding team that built it with Aika Technology.
I'm Alizay Ayesha, founder of ZarLabs. I pitched Med Dev Insight Hub at the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP), and presented medical device opportunities at Medicare Hospital for Group Captain Riazat Ali Changaizi.
Rooms like that take nerve. Regulators and healthcare leaders don't have time for ideas that aren't ready.
But this story isn't really about me at the front of a room. It's about everyone who made it possible for me to stand there.
A fragmented industry
Pakistan's medical device ecosystem was scattered. Manufacturers, distributors, healthcare providers, investors, regulators and international buyers had no shared place to find each other. DRAP regulations, certification and licensing information was hard to navigate.
In a market like that, good products struggle to reach the people who need them.
How it started
From May 2024 to November 2025, our founding team worked as technology partner with Aika Technology in Karachi, part-time and hybrid, taking the platform from concept to implementation. Product planning, stakeholder engagement and healthcare innovation were shaped together with Group Captain Riazat Ali Changaizi.
The three things our team changed
We mapped the industry first.
Our founding team researched and analysed Pakistan's medical device industry and turned it into structured datasets on manufacturers, suppliers, healthcare organisations and devices. We brought DRAP regulations, certification, licensing and compliance documents into one centralised knowledge base, a repository of thousands of regulatory documents.
We built the platform the industry could run on.
A responsive frontend, backend and database architecture, authentication and role-based admin dashboards. Then the business modules: client records, investor management, collaborations, manufacturing workflows, order tracking, shipments, returns, inventory and reporting, plus community and collaboration spaces. All built in React, Next.js, TypeScript and PostgreSQL.
We added a guide, not just a database.
AI-powered consultation helps users explore investment opportunities, regulatory pathways and market entry.
The team behind the pitch
When I presented the admin dashboard and pitched at DRAP and Medicare Hospital, I wasn't presenting my work. I was presenting ours: the research, the data engineering, the architecture and the code our founding team built over many months.
You can watch the mini vlog from the DRAP pitch here: https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1EoBcxBrLt/
If you're building in a regulated, complicated space
Healthcare, compliance and fragmented markets aren't solved with a pretty website. They take research, data, and a team willing to learn the rules before it writes the code.
That's the team we've built at ZarLabs.
If your industry feels too complicated to digitise, that's exactly the work we want to talk about.