How Careem went from Pakistan’s ride-hailing leader to stuck on the sidelines
In 2022, when Careem announced that its app had completed its billionth ride, Pakistan was the company’s top market. Nearly 30% of the billion Careem rides had come from Pakistan, where the app was synonymous with ride-hailing.
Careem — whose co-founder and CEO Mudassir Sheikha is of Pakistani origin — was so closely linked to the country that it was often assumed to be a Pakistani company in media reports and social media posts, despite being headquartered in Dubai.
Within this short span, new entrants like inDrive and Yango have taken over the ride-hailing sector in the world’s fifth most populous nation, with Careem lagging at a distant third. Careem currently has just 373,920 daily active users in Pakistan, as compared to over 2 million for inDrive, according to data analytics platform Data.ai. The company has also shut down its food delivery and digital payments businesses in Pakistan over the past two years. The country may have dropped in priority due to its unstable economic environment, Kalsoom Lakhani, a venture capitalist who has observed the Pakistani tech startup ecosystem for over a decade, told Rest of World.
“When you’re dealing with devaluation [of the Pakistani rupee] in the current [economic] environment, it looks like [Careem] would probably want to put their energy competing in places where the returns matter greater,” said Lakhani, the founder of i2i Ventures, a Pakistan-focused VC fund. According to her, Careem has been scaling back “very purposefully” in Pakistan.
