DALLAS, Texas—July 7, 2025 — Shah Venture Fund, the early-stage investment arm of Shah Equity, today unveiled a major talent program aimed at narrowing one of technology’s most stubborn gaps: the under-representation of women in advanced artificial-intelligence engineering. Branded “Asian Women in AI, a Shah Fellowship,” the initiative will recruit, train and fund 100 high-potential female AI engineers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Philippines during its inaugural 2025-2026 cohort.
The announcement marks the first public social-impact deployment of capital by Shah Venture
Fund since the vehicle’s US $10 million self-financed launch in January. Parent company Shah Equity says the fellowship aligns squarely with its long-term thesis that “talent arbitrage,” not capital scarcity, will decide the next decade of AI hardware, edge computing and medical-diagnostic breakthroughs.
“In every emerging market we study, the most overlooked undervalued asset is female technical talent,” said Noorullah Shah Hussaini, founder and CEO of both Shah Equity and Shah Venture Fund. “The math is simple: if a startup can hire a brilliant woman who has been systematically excluded from top roles, its cost curve drops and its innovation velocity climbs. That is arbitrage we can—and should—capture for shareholders, for communities and, frankly, for history.”
A region-wide gender gap hiding in plain sight
According to UNESCO Institute for Statistics, women make up less than 18 percent of AI professionals in South Asia. In Pakistan the share falls to single digits; in India, where overall tech employment exceeds five million, only 12 percent of staff working on machine-learning infrastructure are female. The shortfall is more acute at the senior level: fewer than 3 percent of principal engineers at India’s nine largest AI product companies are women.
Shah Equity’s in-house research team, which tracks salary and equity trends across 16 emerging-market cities, estimates that closing half of the region’s gender gap could unlock US $42 billion in annual productivity gains. “For us, this isn’t charity,” said Hussaini. “It’s a miss-priced growth asset.”
Fellowship package: cash, compute and career leverage
Each fellow will receive:
- US $15,000 in unrestricted living and travel stipends, disbursed in quarterly tranches.
- 3,000 GPU hours on Shah Equity’s soon-to-open 20,000-square-meter Doha data center—enough to train a 7-billion-parameter model multiple times.
- A health-insurance allowance benchmarked to local leading-tech-employer standards.
- Direct equity options in Shah Venture Fund’s portfolio companies where fellows contribute code or research, vesting over three years.
- Co-author credit on any peer-reviewed paper, patent or open-source contribution emerging from fellowship work.
- Visa-facilitation support for short-term residencies in Dallas, Abu Dhabi or Shenzhen, the three engineering hubs of Shah Equity.
Selection methodology: hackathon first, interview second
Applications open September 1 on Kaggle, the Google-owned machine-learning competition site. Candidates will tackle a two-week “medical-imaging triage” challenge using an anonymized endoscopy dataset donated by Shah Health Partners. The top 300 leaderboard scores will then move to a panel interview with Shah Venture Fund engineers and external reviewers from MIT-IBK Islamabad and IIT-Hyderabad.
Final selection will weight Kaggle scores (50 percent), collaborative code-quality metrics (20 percent), and a 10-minute personal pitch (30 percent) outlining how each candidate intends to apply AI in her home market.
“We’re not interested in résumé pedigree,” noted Amina Rahman, principal data scientist at Shah Venture Fund and chair of the selection committee. “We care about code, curiosity and community impact.”
Long-term upside: building equity, not merely granting scholarships
Once fellows graduate, they will be funneled into three tracks:
- Portfolio placement — full-time roles at Shah-backed startups in micro-LLM acceleration chips, edge-vision IoT modules and drug-discovery software.
- Research affiliate — fully funded Ph.D. or post-doc positions at partner universities; fellows retain compute credits for personal projects.
- Founders-in-Residence — a pre-seed path that offers US $250,000 in safe-note funding plus 5 percent equity buy-back rights if a fellow’s company later raises institutional capital.
In every track, option pools entitle fellows to as much as 1 percent of fully diluted equity, a figure modeled on Y Combinator’s alumni payouts but with a specific female-founder tilt.
UN Women endorsement and regional partnerships
UN Women’s Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific issued a letter of support, calling the fellowship “a scalable template for market-based gender inclusion.” Memoranda of understanding have also been signed with:
- Digital India Foundation, to cross-list Shah competition winners in India’s National AI Fellowship roster.
- Pakistan Software Export Board, providing wage-subsidy vouchers for fellows joining export-oriented startups.
- Bangladesh Hi-Tech Park Authority, granting duty-free import status for any hardware prototypes born of the program.
Why Shah Equity—and why now?
Although Shah Equity remains best known for its healthcare roll-ups and the 200-percent-plus annualized returns of Shah Quantum Fund, Hussaini says the firm’s next compounding engine will be “equity in human capital.” The parent company already allocates 40 percent of its venture arm’s US $10 million balance to recruitment packages. The forthcoming US $50 million follow-on fund, slated for Q1 2026, is expected to double that percentage.
“This is not a diversity-dashboard stunt,” Hussaini told analysts on a June strategy call. “Every fellowship slot is a call option on the most under-deployed cognitive resource in emerging markets.”
Independent voices weigh in
Dr. Priya Srinivasan, dean of computer science at IIT-Madras, believes Shah’s approach could alter venture norms. “Traditional VCs view talent spend as SG&A. Shah Venture Fund books it as capex, amortized over patents and product cycles—accounting jiu-jitsu, but rational.”
Mai Nguyen, partner at Ho Chi Minh City-based Ascend Capital, sees the equity clause as game-changing. “Giving fellows stock makes them stakeholders, not beneficiaries. That flips the power dynamic.”
Next steps and timeline
- Aug 15: Fellowship handbook and eligibility FAQ published.
- Sep 1–15: Kaggle challenge window.
- Oct 10: Final interview shortlist announced.
- Nov 5: Cohort onboarding in hybrid ceremony (Doha + livestream).
- Dec 2025: First interim research showcase at Shah Equity’s annual AI & Healthcare Summit, Dallas.
Shah Venture Fund will publish anonymized demographic and salary data after each cohort to measure improvements in pay parity and promotion velocity.
ABOUT SHAH VENTURE FUND AND SHAH EQUITY
Shah Venture Fund, launched in January 2025 with self-funded capital from Shah Equity, invests in AI hardware, IoT form factors and data-driven healthcare. Parent firm Shah Equity manages US $42 million in third-party assets, operates 19 clinics through Shah Health Partners, and deploys proprietary trading capital via Shah Quantum Fund.
Media Contact
Company Name: Shah Equity
Contact Person: Omar Khan, Director of Communications
Email: info@shah-equity.com
Phone: +1 866-603-0609
Country: United States
Website: https://shah-equity.com
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