Meet the entrepreneur who just snared $350m to slaughter Uber

Mudassir Sheikha, co-founder of Careem. Photo credit: Careem.

“The idea was not just to build a big business, but start one that would have a big impact,” explains Mudassir Sheikha, co-founder of ride-hailing startup Careem. “We wanted to improve the lives of thousands of people and change society for the better.”

And it seems like Mudassir’s on track to succeed on both fronts. Careem’s now the newest ride-hailing unicorn – it announced today that it’s pocketed a substantial US$350 million from a slew of investors including Rakuten and Saudi Telecom.

The funding round is the single largest investment in any startup from Dubai. And there still might be more to come – the company says it’s planning on locking in a further US$150 million at some point.

Humble origins

The idea for a transportation service occurred to Mudassir and his co-founder Magnus Olsson back in 2012. Both were working as management consultants at McKinsey but itched to do something more rewarding, something entrepreneurial.

“We made a list of problems we faced during our time in the Middle East, everywhere from healthcare, to education, and logistics […] Eventually we settled on transportation because if you’re a consultant in Dubai, then you’re constantly traveling to markets like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan and you’re dealing with ground transport companies on a daily basis,” says Mudassir.

“We understood how bad service reliability levels were and we knew we could use technology to improve how these businesses were run and take it to the next level.”

Mudassir moved back to Pakistan but his tech roots stayed with him.

Mudassir’s prior background in tech startups certainly helped the cause. The entrepreneur, who grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, moved to the US for college, graduating from the University of Southern California with a degree in economics and computer science in 1999. He went on to finish a masters from Stanford in 2003.

His first exposure to tech came with a stint at Silicon Valley startup Brience, which had raised US$200 million in funding and was considered a hot prospect for an IPO. But the dot-com crash hit badly and it was later acquired.

Mudassir moved back to Pakistan but his tech roots stayed with him. He co-founded DeviceAnywhere in 2003 to help test and monitor the performance of mobile apps and websites. The startup eventually grew to a team of over a hundred people – spanning the Bay Area and Pakistan – before being acquired by Keynote in 2008.

It was then that Mudassir chose to join McKinsey, working out of the Dubai office.

“The idea was that I spend two years in McKinsey and go back to the entrepreneurial world. But two years became four and I figured I have to do this now because I’m not getting any younger,” he says.

The founder met his “partner in crime” in Magnus – who was recovering from a brain surgery he had in 2011. “Both of us were in the same place at the same time,” he smiles.

Driving ahead