Making Transport In Pakistan Safe For Everyone With BusCaro

Every start-up business hopes to grow rapidly, but sometimes entrepreneurs have broader ambitions too. “The thing that makes me most proud about BusCaro isn’t its commercial success,” reflects Maha Shahad, the founder and CEO of the public transport company she launched in Pakistan in 2022. “It is the conversations I have with women who tell me that we’ve made it possible for them to work and with students who say they wouldn’t be able to get to classes without us.”

I first interviewed BusCaro in 2023, shortly after it launched rideshare services aimed at solving Pakistan’s problems with transport options that were often unsafe, unreliable and unaffordable. Today, the company is announcing it has raised $2 million of new funding as it continues to scale.

BusCaro aims to provide safe and dependable transport for ordinary Pakistanis simply trying to go about their lives – particularly for women who often report they face harassment and aggression when travelling independently. To achieve that goal, it has teamed up with thousands of drivers who then provide multi-passenger transport on fixed routes and at fixed times with their cars, minivans and buses.

It’s a relatively cheap service, but the big attraction is safety. BusCaro makes background checks on all its drivers and also checks their vehicles are roadworthy. It provides an app through which passengers can sound a panic alert if they feel threatened, and tracks each driver on their routes to make sure no-one is deviating. Parents using BusCaro’s services to get children to school can also use the app to check on their kids’ progress and safety.

“In the three years we’ve been in business we haven’t had a single incident of harassment reported,” says Shahad, who points out that drivers receive training on issues such as gender sensitivity.

For many passengers – particularly young women – this is proving transformational. Ayesha Mumtaz, a computer science student at Islamabad’s Capital University of Science & Technology, pays around $40 a month for the service and recently told the Rest of World newsletter: “It’s like a private van service, with additional safety features; their vans are clean, on time, drop me off on campus right before my first class, and I’m back home on time in the evening.”

Demand for BusCaro’s services has grown rapidly. By the end of its first full year in 2023, it was taking 400,000 monthly bookings; today, the figure has risen to more than 900,000.

That has brought commercial success, with the company currently enjoying annual recurring revenues of more than $6 million and projected to get to $8.6 million by the end of the year.

In part, that success reflects a robust business model, with BusCaro learning from the failures of two companies that previously sought to provide travel solutions through vehicle sharing. Both Swvl and Airlift have pulled their services in recent years after failing to reach sufficient scale because they couldn’t sign up passengers quickly enough.

By contrast, BusCaro has never sought to target individual passengers. Instead, it signs contracts with employers, universities and schools, all of which have large workforces or student populations that need to get to them each day. Each organisation onboarded brings a significant new base of potential customers and also gives BusCaro credibility. Customers include private and public-sector employers such as PepsiCo and Indus Hospital, but Shazad is now particularly focused on increasing its reach into schools and colleges.

“Having started out with a laser focus on the safety of women, we very quickly realised there was a huge safety issue for children too,” Shahzad explains. “Parents are desperate to make sure their children can get to and from school safely; each time we launch a service with a new school we see the same thing – on the first day, the bus is empty, but there is a queue of parents trailing it round the route to check up on it, and by the end of the week the bus is full.”

BusCaro now operates in four cities – Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad and Rawalpindi – but is keen to expand across Pakistan, and to add more services in areas where it is already present.

The demand is certainly there and BusCaro has prominent supporters. “There is a real need for safe and affordable public transport for the underserved segments of society in Pakistan, especially women,” says Bilal Azhar Kayani, finance minister in the Government of Punjab. “I believe that such services will help address that gap and empower women across the country.”

The challenge is working capital, because BusCaro commits to paying its drivers on very quick terms, not least so they can continue to fuel their vehicles.

Hence today’s $2 million fund-raising, which comprises $1.2 million of new equity and an $800,000 debt facility. The round is led by Daman Investments, with other investors including Cartography Capital, Epic Angels, Wahed Ventures, Accelerate Prosperity and several business angels.

“We back visionary founders who are solving real challenges at scale and BusCaro is a stand-out example,” says Ahmed Khizer Khan, CEO of Daman Investments. “By making commuting safe, structured, and technology-driven, Maha and her team are improving lives every day.”