“I am fascinated by the scale of innovation and diversity of fields that these entrepreneurs are working on. I’m quite blown away.”
These are the comments by Mudassir Sheikha, CEO and Co-Founder of Careem after meeting the startup founders at NIC Peshawar. It was an exciting opportunity for the startups of NIC Peshawar to meet this exceptional innovator and get feedback on their own businesses. Mudassir interacted with some of these young entrepreneurs and encouraged them to scale up to the global level.
Careem is one of the pioneer unicorns in the MENA region and a complete game changer in local transport sector. Mudassir is a Karachite, a graduate of Stanford University and University of Southern California in USA. He has extensive work experience with Tech Startups of Silicon Valley before he joined McKinsey, a global management company. In 2012, Mudassir started Careem with his Swedish Colleague, Magnus Olsson. In a matter of just 5 years, Careem expanded its operations in more than 100 cities in 14 countries. So much so that Uber announced the agreement to acquire Careem for $3.1 Billion in March this year.
Murtaza Zaidi, Director NIC Peshawar, gave a brief presentation on the entrepreneurial landscape of KP. He introduced founders of some of the startups to Mudassir. Some of our star startups pitched their ideas in front of Mudassir. Bera presented him with a pair of their premium quality traditional Peshawari Chappal, which he was very excited to receive. He advised Aprus and AI Thalascreen, two electro-medical innovators, to think on the global scale, “Think global, research on the global health care trends in your respective fields and make global scaling strategies.” He was also very much impressed by the energy conservation solution for industries presented by Brown Energy.
Mudassir actively interacted with all the startups and gave valuable feedbacks to the founders. After the session, while talking to the team of NIC Peshawar, he commented, He advised the startups “to build very good teams and always focus on the customers”.
He appreciated the team of NIC and said that it was a great learning experience for him as well and he would love to visit very soon again.
