What The Hell America!

Mudassir Sheikha likes to tell the story of Careem’s growth in chapters.

The first began in 2012, when Sheikha and Magnus Olsson co-founded the company as a corporate car booking service in Dubai. Careem, which means “generous” in Arabic, quickly became a household name across the Middle East and North Africa. Its adaptation and understanding of cultural nuances helped it secure several rounds of funding, fueling expansion as a ride-hailing leader in the region. In 2019, Uber announced its acquisition of Careem for $3.1 billion, a significant milestone for the region’s tech industry. 

The second chapter involved integrating Careem into the Uber ecosystem, a period of transition from a purely ride-hailing company to more than 15 services — including food delivery, bike rentals, financial services, and grocery delivery — on a single app. Its third and current phase, initiated by a strategic spinout of all non-ride-hailing services from Uber at the end of 2023, marks a resurgence of Sheikha’s renewed focus on the future. 

“We are now restarting the entrepreneurial journey with the ambition to become one of the largest consumer internet platforms in the region,” he told Rest of World. To put it simply, Sheikha wants to transform Careem into “a digital butler for everyday life.”

For Sheikha, the concept of a digital butler transcends the transactional nature of super-apps. It focuses instead on a personalized and intuitive user experience, where Careem takes direct responsibility for the quality of its services, distinguishing it from platforms that merely connect users with third-party vendors. Under Sheikha’s leadership, Careem has adopted a strategic approach to expansion, prioritizing depth over breadth. It currently operates in over 70 cities in 10 countries across the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. But instead of rapidly expanding into new countries, Sheikha said the company is focused on deepening its service offerings within existing markets, leveraging its established customer base.

Beyond its core business, Careem has significantly contributed to the burgeoning tech ecosystem in the Middle East and North Africa. If you’re plugged into the region’s tech circles, it might be hard to miss the term “Careem mafia,” an impressive network of over 600 former employees who have either launched their own startups or joined other ventures as co-founders.

One of Careem’s defining qualities has been its ability to thrive in very complex, fragmented markets. Sheikha credited that achievement to the company’s desire and ability to adapt to local needs, something many Western companies fail to understand when entering emerging markets. “There’s generally a view that the world is going to adapt to you versus you adapting to the world,” he said. “In many cases, it happens because there’s no substitute: The world adapts to you. But when there are substitutes, there’s Careem and others that start in these markets, then we adapt to our customers and that just gives us the edge.”

Sheikha and I met at Careem’s headquarters in Dubai. The following conversation, which has been lightly edited, is from our conversation in February.

You started as a ride-hailing powerhouse and expanded into a number of countries. Do you still consider yourself a ride-hailing company at heart, or are you becoming a one-stop shop for everyone’s daily needs?

It’s a journey. We see the destination as being a consumer internet or a consumer digital platform, which allows people to consume services that they need to use on a daily basis to make their lives simpler and more productive. We started with ride-hailing, so the first things we did were for ride-hailing. Deliveries were next. We started with food delivery, then grocery delivery, and pharmacy delivery. And then payments. Surprisingly, we had to build a lot to operate in these markets because when we started, there were very few people with credit cards in the region. A lot of the transactions are still happening in cash.

In the process of building and scaling Careem, we built a fairly sophisticated payment infrastructure to collect and settle payments. Then payments became another leg, which we now call CareemPay. Initially, it was just paying our captains — or drivers. We realized they were sending money back home, so we needed to make it easy for them. They needed to pay their bills, pay for their prepaid cellphone cards. We’re just following our customers in some path that is adjacent to the capabilities that we’re building over time.

The term you have used to describe Careem’s evolution is “everyone’s digital butler.” Many companies have attempted the “super-app model, like WeChat or Gojek, but a digital butler suggests something more personalized.

There are probably different cuts you can take on this. There’s one which is, “I’m just a platform and I’m going to make sure that you get the services that you need,” which in some ways is the view that Apple’s [App Store] or Android take. They publish an app. You can use the app — some apps will be good and some apps will not be good. The other archetype of a platform is: “I’m going to put the services on the app that I’m going to stand behind, that I will ensure the right levels of services on. And if something goes wrong, I’m not going to blame the captain or the restaurant or someone else — it’s my responsibility.”

We are in that second archetype because the whole purpose of Careem is to simplify the lives of people. I’m not going to simplify your life if I’m going to burden you with the responsibility of selecting the right services and then working with all kinds of vendors to get the right quality of service. If you order something on Careem or do something on Careem, then you could just forget about that something. That’s the approach we have taken.

The best example of this is groceries. When we first started, we worked with existing grocery stores. We realized that if a customer ordered 10 things but one thing was out of stock, they would end up getting nine things. And the customer would wonder why that one thing is missing. Or we’d have to call them and make sure there is a replacement. The experience wasn’t very seamless. At some point, we realized that we needed to go a little bit deeper. Today, we own our own grocery stores, and we own the end-to-end experience of the customer. If you want to order five lemons and we only have four lemons in stock, you can only order four lemons. There are no surprises. 

The big difference is we stand behind the services that people consume. We’re good partners — we have to cover for our partners, strengthen our partners. If you don’t find partners that have the strength, then we do it ourselves.

Where does artificial intelligence fit into your vision to turn Careem into a true digital butler? 

Everyone is starting to talk about AI, it’s become a buzzword. But frankly, for what we were building, even in ride hailing, we had to use machine learning at the time to predict where the next order comes from and proactively place our drivers. From the estimated time of arrival on the app to fraud detection, AI was already helping us with so many things.

There are three vectors that have emerged. The first one is around personalization, which was happening before but now the topic has gone on steroids. It’s not just happening because AI is more accessible or cheaper but also because we have a lot more data on our customers than we had before. Previously, we were simply taking you from point A to point B. Now, we have a lot more information on you, which means we could personalize everything better for you. The second vector is efficiency. Our engineers, our customer service, our marketing team are more productive because they are using AI to do things more efficiently than before. 

You mentioned having access to data. With the kind of ambition Careem has, you will have access to — and the need for — a lot of personalized data. How do you balance building a top-notch personalized customer service with data privacy and ethical AI usage?

A lot of the use of AI at Careem, and the data that feeds into AI, is around making sure your life is as simple as possible. We should be able to predict before you even open the app that you need to use the service. Why make you go through two clicks? In fact, why even make someone open the app? We will tell you at lunchtime, “Hey, it’s lunchtime. This is the time you order food every day. These are the three things that you’ve ordered in the past.” Click one button and your lunch will come. 

We are, at the end of the day, a marketplace and the marketplace has to be as lean as possible so the stakeholders — both on the customer side and the corporate side — get the maximum value. The more efficient we are, the better it is for the people we serve. 

The challenge of growing your business and succeeding in Cairo or Karachi is unique. Can you recall a persistent challenge you have faced while scaling Careem? And how do you balance the need for rapid growth while thinking about realities on the ground — whether socioeconomic or geopolitical — in these regions?

The biggest issue is that markets are different. Egypt is different from Pakistan, which of course is very different from the UAE or Saudi Arabia. As an operating model, we wanted to make sure we empower the front line. So, in some ways, what we did worked for us for some time. But there’s a shelf life for everything, right?

We said, “Let’s put this technology in the hands of people who are from those markets, who understand those local realities, and let them use the configuration we’ve given them.”

For example, 12 years ago, if you told someone in Pakistan that you can use this app to get in a car to go somewhere, it would sound delusional because people don’t trust getting in a car with a stranger without being fearful of getting kidnapped or of some crime happening. Our team on the ground realized that we needed to build trust. So we ended up working with a security company that was certifying employees for American consulates in Pakistan. We assigned them to do the security checks or background checks of our captains. In many cases, they went to the village where the person was from, did some reference checks around the house, and put a GPS coordinate for that house. Then we had to communicate this to the customers that this is the level of security we’re going through to make sure we take responsibility for you in the car. 

Careem operates in more than 70 cities around the world today. You’re in Pakistan, but not in India or Bangladesh. Is it a conscious choice? How do you decide what country you go to?

In the 2010s, there was a little bit of ride-hailing world conquest that was happening. We started here [in Dubai] and many of the customers we were serving at the time were from the Middle East. So we naturally expanded to the countries in our customer base. By the time we were done with that, the rest of the world was taken. India had big players already and they were doing quite well. Bangladesh had players that were established. At some point, we realized that instead of going broader, we should go deeper, which is what you see with the everything app. Then the whole approach changed. In a place like the UAE, we have 15 services. Instead of adding the next city or the next country, we are adding the next service. Which, by the way, ends up becoming way more efficient than opening in 20 different markets because you are acquiring the customer once and deepening that customer relationship.

I was recently in Saudi Arabia. The entire region is undergoing a massive economic shift, with countries like the UAE and Saudi Arabia prioritizing tech innovation as part of their Vision 2030 and post-oil diversification strategies. How is Careem adapting to these changes, and what role does it play in supporting the region’s broader economic ambitions?

This is really an exciting time to be here because the ruling families are very ambitious. There’s an insane sense of urgency to make progress. And a lot of investment is happening to drive that ambition forward. In some ways, we are a bit lucky because we are doing tech at a time when the tech revolution is happening. One of the small contributions that Careem has made is the cohort of 600-plus “Careem mafia” — former Careem employees who have launched their own startup ventures. That’s the largest cohort of entrepreneurs in the region.

We’ve been quite involved in the next level as well. At some point, there was a big drive for public-private partnerships in the UAE. We were one of the first companies that had a public-private partnership with the Dubai government in the form of Hala, which are public taxis in the city.

In Saudi Arabia, women empowerment was a big issue. One of the numbers that was cited said there were about 2.5 million women who were not working because they didn’t have transportation to go to work. So we partnered with the country’s Human Resources Development Fund to create Wusool, an initiative that allowed working women to use the Careem app, through funding from the Ministry of Labor, to travel to and from work in a subsidized way. We’ve also done work on the sustainability side — you will see bikes and scooters in different parts of town. But, overall, the ambition is to build something massive from the region.

Sustainability is becoming a key focus for mobility worldwide. Here in the region itself, there is a huge emphasis on the green mobility movement. Are programs like electric vehicles and bike-sharing part of Careem’s plan?

It is happening, at least for the ride-hailing side, which is now controlled by Uber. We have a carbon capture ride-hailing product that customers can choose and it offsets the emissions by planting mangroves, which is actually a very effective way to offset emissions. And those are native to the UAE.

We have bikes in Dubai, in Abu Dhabi, in Medina, and a few more cities are coming. So micromobility is part of the initiative. The bikes that do deliveries are also starting to become electric. The main thing is that these things have to be economically viable.

I want to quickly go back to the “Careem mafia” reference. You’ve said how there’s probably not an investor deck in the region that doesn’t mention Careem as an example. Today, the region’s tech scene is more competitive than ever. How does Careem plan to maintain its leadership position while continuing to have that experimentation layer and innovate?

You have to focus on the customer. That’s the only truth in business. Make sure the customers are getting the right quality of service. There are so many examples from the many years of Careem: When things have gone wrong on the customer side, we have literally showed up with chocolate boxes to apologize to the customer. There’s a big obsession with customer service. Second, we have to believe that ambition manifests itself if you can give yourself the license to be super ambitious — even if you don’t have a path to it. If you dream, somehow you will find a way to achieve that. In most things we do, we try to ask ourselves what’s the craziest goal that we can set ourselves up for, and then we try to make a run for it. Sometimes we don’t get there, but sometimes we get there, and those are amazing outcomes. 

I ask a lot of entrepreneurs and founders what they think Western companies get wrong when they enter emerging markets. More specifically, what can they learn from Careem’s ability to adapt in these fragmented markets?

There’s generally a view that the world is going to adapt to you versus you adapting to the world. In many cases, it happens because there’s no substitute: The world adapts to you. But when there are substitutes, there is Careem and others that start in these markets, then we adapt to our customers and that just gives us the edge.

The second thing is — and you’ll see it in this region, especially with the people that have gone through Careem and the Careem mafia — this ecosystem is way more purposeful than the other ecosystems that might be a bit more curiosity-driven, greed-driven. There’s a lot of ambition and desire here to uplift the region because it has been through a lot in the last 20 to 30 years. So it’s really coming from a good place, to do our part to pull the region up, which is very refreshing and different from what might be happening elsewhere.

Careem has been operating for a long time and has had its fair share of crises. Are you comfortable sharing any particular episode of failure that stuck with you and how you overcame it?

There are times we’ve lost focus when we should have been more focused and gotten a few countries, a few products, a few services really well before we moved on to the next one. The Careem of today is a lot more focused. If you open the app today and use our services in Dubai, we truly believe that every service that is on the Careem app is better than what’s available out there. It’s world-class service and there’s a lot of focus that has gone into making it world-class. That comes at the expense of not doing these services everywhere. We will do it sequentially and we will do it in a focused way.

What advice do you have for a young entrepreneur in Dubai? There are tens of thousands from all over the world who are moving here with big startup dreams.

Find a problem to solve. The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity. There is no shortage of problems that we could solve in the region. Find a big problem to solve, be super ambitious in the way that you approach it, and make sure you get the right people on board. You can only go so far by yourself.