Pakistani’s bus booking startup Airlift, which was launched less than five months ago has raised over $2.2 million to build the mass transit infrastructure for the developing world.
With over 50,000 rides/month, Airlift will use the funding to spearhead the third wave of ride-sharing by use of higher capacity vehicles to make urban commute fast, reliable and economical. Airlift is capitalizing on the enormous latent demand in the market and will expand to the MENA region and to Kenya, in East Africa.
The firm will be taking on Little Shuttle in Kenya, SWVL in Kenya and in Egypt and Careem Bus which has been operational in Egypt for some time now and recently launched in Sudan.
The round was co-led by Fatima Gobi Ventures, through their Techxila Fund I vehicle and Indus Valley Capital plus several other notable angel investors participated in the earlier stages.
Usman Gul co-founder and CEO Airlift told TechMoran, “We are absolutely considering Nairobi as the next market we launch.”
Airlift started to meet a need when, in the summer of 2018, Gul returned to his hometown in Lahore (Pakistan) on a one-month vacation prior to business school. Upon experiencing the difficulty involved in the daily commute in Lahore, he started thinking about ways to use higher capacity vehicles to build an efficient mass transit network, one that relied on previously underutilized vehicles that were already present in the market.
Four months later, he dropped out of INSEAD’s MBA Program to launch Airlift Technologies. On March 1, 2019, a small founding team launched operations with a pilot project in Lahore. Airlift introduces a marketplace solution that allows bus owners to operate their buses on fixed routes, offering a stop-to-stop solution.
Prior to moving to Pakistan, Gul worked at DoorDash, a food delivery unicorn headquartered in San Francisco. Tony Xu, Founder/CEO at DoorDash, which was valued at $12.6 billion in the last round, was among the first few angel investors to support Airlift. Pritesh Gupta, one of the co-founders of Mumbai-based ZipGo, which offers a similar solution, joined Airlift as an official advisor.
Airlift’s founding team, consisting of Ahmed Ayub, Awaab Khaakwany, Meher Farrukh, Muhammad Owais and Zohaib Ali, is now on a trajectory to expand the Company’s footprint to other major urban centers in the developing world.
According to Gobi’s Chairman and Founding Partner Thomas G. Tsao, “Pakistan is the second largest Muslim market in the world and is at the center of a US$200 B Muslim digital market. It is increasingly evident to savvy investors that Muslims are one of the most powerful sets of consumer purchasers and there is an immense market opportunity as the communities’ digital needs are largely underserved.”
The Fund is focusing on Seed and Series A investments in startups in travel, logistics, fintech, healthcare, education, e-commerce, consumer tech and industrial internet.
For both Fatima and Gobi, the launch of the Fund not only means more funding options for Pakistani startups, but it will help to promote common values, the digitization of traditional industries, as well as further the inclusion of underserved communities as a whole.
“Pakistan is emerging, and we at Fatima want to help Pakistani entrepreneurs emerge with her. Through our partnership with Gobi, we will now be able to fully support and nurture early-stage companies and, when they are ready, we can help them to scale. Gobi’s region-wide network and wealth of experience together with Fatima’s large footprints and local expertise will also be a boost to the Pakistani entrepreneurial community,” said Fatima Ventures Founder and CEO Ali Mukhtar.
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