Egyptian Start-Up Swvl Plans to Invest $25 Million in Pakistan

This article is published in partnership with swvl. Cairo based swvl, Egypt’s first tech unicorn, plans to mobilise half a million Pakistanis by 2023.

How do they plan to achieve this?

The company plans to invest $25 million in Pakistan, which will in turn create more than 10,000 jobs every year. The news comes forth a mere month since the app based bus hailing company expanded operations by launching in Pakistan’s metropolitan hub, Karachi.

“We have plans of mobilising half a million Pakistanis by 2023 and creating 10K jobs a year. We are also planning to start an incubator to fund pre-seed startups to kickstart a healthy tech ecosystem in Pakistan,” stated Mostafa Kandil, the founder of swvl. In times when Pakistan’s economy is struggling, swvl’s initiative comes as a welcome move, which will hopefully help not only the economy but also result in the mobilisation of thousands of Pakistanis and make accessing jobs easier. Investing in Pakistan’s existent but often overlooked startup sphere will also enable the country’s youth to focus on developing innovative solutions to existing economic and social problems. Due to reliability and ease of use, swvl is enabling women to reclaim public spaces, aiding them in becoming a functioning segment of the economy.

Mostafa Kandil has also confirmed the company will be setting up engineering offices in the country which will house a full fledge engineering team. As the company grows in Pakistan, half of its current employees are Pakistani. Swvl claims to ‘reinvent public transport’ by offering reliable and affordable transportation, backed by solid tech, which enables users to book seats on busses from a dense map of operating routes across the city.

The global mobility leader which launched in Nairobi little over six months ago, kick started operations in Lahore over the summer of 2019; it is also the first start-up in the mass transit space to launch in all three metropolitan cities in Pakistan.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *