Almost every AI infrastructure company you’ve heard of was started in San Francisco. The default assumption when someone says “we’re building an AI startup” is that you’re somewhere within a forty-minute drive of the Caltrain. We’re not. Korelos is being built in Islamabad, and I want to be honest about why that’s a deliberate choice.

The talent argument

Pakistan graduates more software engineers per year than most people realize, and the ones at the top of the curve compete directly with anyone in the world. We’ve been able to assemble a small founding team without compromising on technical depth. The cost structure means we can afford to take longer to get the architecture right, instead of shipping the first thing that compiles to chase a runway clock.

The proximity-to-customers argument

The honest counter is: most early enterprise AI buyers are in the US and Europe. We don’t pretend otherwise. What we’ve found is that asynchronous-first communication, written specs, and recorded demos cover ninety percent of the early-customer relationship anyway. The other ten percent is travel, and travel is solvable.

The local context argument

There’s a real advantage to building infrastructure for AI agents from somewhere that doesn’t already assume the answers. The teams in San Francisco are converging on a small number of architectural patterns because they all read the same blog posts and go to the same dinners. We get to look at the same problems with a slightly different starting context, and that’s produced ideas in the codebase that I’m genuinely proud of.

The honest tradeoffs

Time zones are real. Banking and payment infrastructure for international customers is harder than it should be. The investor mental model for “AI infra startup” comes pre-loaded with a Bay Area address, and we’ve had to be patient about explaining that this isn’t a downside. We’ve also had to be deliberate about hiring — there are domains (e.g. enterprise distribution) where US-based co-leads will eventually matter, and we’re planning for that.

None of these tradeoffs are unique to Pakistan. They’re the tradeoffs of building anywhere outside the default. The difference is that we get to make them on purpose.

Where we’re going

We’re a small team right now: a founding pair (myself and our CTO Hussein Aalee), a roadmap pointed at developer beta in mid 2027, and an early-access waitlist that’s growing faster than we expected. We’re going to keep being honest about where we are, what we’re building, and how we got here. I think that’s the right way to do this.

If you’re building agents and want to be part of the early-access cohort, the waitlist is open. We read every signup.