Islamabad, 30 June 2022 – Walee Technologies Pvt. Ltd. (Walee), Pakistan’s leading influencer marketing technology company, and the country’s top academic institution, the NUST School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (SEECS) have established Pakistan’s first industry-academia Center of excellence to develop innovative social and digital AI-driven solutions and deeper intelligence to serve the USD100 billion* global creator economy.  The initiatives will first serve the Middle East, North Africa, and Pakistan (MENAP) market, which has a digital advertising and ecommerce marketing expected to exceed USD 60 billion in 2022 and an overall potential to double by 2030**. 

The Walee-NUST Center of Excellence (WNCE) for social and digital media technologies is a long-term mutually-beneficial collaboration by way of research and development activities, continuous upgrading of academic course content and knowledge transfer between faculty, students and Walee’s engineering teams. WNCE can also enhance their professional visibility by way of contributing to publications, leading to higher global rankings. Walee’s adoption of web 3.0 is a strong step in meeting its vision to shape the media-advertising space in the next five years with innovative solutions and techstacks. The physical, co-branded and fully functional tech facility on NUST’s premises will boost participants’ team dynamics when working on deliverables. 

From a media industry perspective, Walee is the only martech that has collaborated with academia to invest in the country’s future talent. Muhammad Ahsan Tahir, CEO Walee and a 2014 SEECS engineering graduate, said, “As an aIumni, I am privileged to give back to SEECS’ 2,500 students and faculty members. We will help them contribute to design and development projects, and to deliver globally scalable, AI-driven system serving largest B2B and B2C brands in MENAP and Turkey market” He added, “Walee Technologies helps leading brands and agencies across these areas to serve more than 500 million in population, to impactfully collaborate with creators and others to market, sell and service products to consumers using AI-driven solutions.”    

The partnership supports NUST’s SEECS program strategy in ensuring it ranks as Pakistan’s top engineering program for the sixth consecutive year (QS Programs). Dr Rafia Mumtaz, Head of Software Engineering department at NUST, said, “By working with Walee’s engineering teams, we aim to enhance our marketing and media technologies knowledge in context to in-demand programming languages, data science and Web 3.0.  This partnership will empower our students to be successful in their academics and future professional endeavours.” In the current economic climate, where startups are struggling to survive, Walee’s initiative to invest in the talent pool was welcomed by the faculty.  

Dr Muhammad Ajmal Khan, Principal, NUST SEECS, added, “We greatly appreciate the generous initiative of SEECS Alumnus, Muhammad Ahsan Tahir, and his efforts to pay back to the institute.” He added, “industry-academia linkages are the need of the hour and NUST-SEECS will strive to strengthen this connection.”

An MOU signing and the Center of Excellence inauguration ceremony was held on 30 June 2022 at NUST campus and was attended by more than 100 CEOs, industry leaders, government officials, the development sector, leading NUST academics, media, and others. Visit the image gallery of the event here.

Note:
* Influencer Marketing Hub
**Figures extracted from CNBB Solutions for e-commerce and Zenith Optimedia for internet ad spend.

About Walee
Launched in November 2019, Walee is Pakistan’s leading influencer marketing and social commerce platform, with more than 100,000 influencers and 5,000 merchants across nearly 300 cities and has serviced leading global and national brands.  Walee’s full MarTech suite includes Influencer Insight reports, Influencer Marketing services, Shops, Walee Payment Gateway, Social Listening and Digital Service Center. Walee has been supported by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google Accelerator, Ignite under the Ministry of IT, Amazon and others. Walee currently operates in Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad and Dubai. In 2021, Walee announced Z2C Limited would fund its seed round.   

Discover more about Walee: https://www.walee.pk/
Download the Walee app: Google Playstore or Appstore

About NUST SEECS
NUST-SEECS is committed to provide world-class education and research opportunities in Pakistan. The school offers postgraduate and undergraduate programmes covering the disciplines of electrical engineering, software engineering, and computer science. These programmes blending digital systems, communication technologies, power and control systems, Artificial Intelligence, data science, information security, robotics, and other information retrieving/processing tools equip our students with the requisite know-how for solving real-life problems and coping with challenges of the professional world ahead.