How inDrive became Pakistan's no.1 ride-hailing app

A model born in a Siberian winter

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the question that brought the inDrive team to the show: how does a late entrant break into what looks like a saturated market? “Until a couple of years ago,” he says, “I thought it was a very saturated industry. One model, and whoever was the first mover — after that, it would be very difficult for anyone to break in.”

Petrov Afinasé, inDrive’s Business Development Manager for South Asia, answers by going back to the origin. The company was not born in a boardroom. It started as a Facebook group post in Yakutsk, Russia — one of the coldest cities on earth — where a friend told Petrov to share his address, destination, and a price he was willing to pay. Drivers called back immediately. “It was amazing when you get a lot of phone calls,” Petrov recalls. Founder Arsene Tomski saw the scheme, recognised it could scale, and built inDrive around it. That was nine years before this recording. The company is not a newcomer — it simply grew quietly.

47 countries, $140 million, no VC strings

What makes inDrive structurally unusual is its funding discipline. Hasan Ali Khureshi, who heads Pakistan operations, puts a number on it that stops the conversation: “We have only raised up until 140 million US dollars.” For a company operating in 47 countries and over 700 cities, that figure is striking.

Hasan explains the logic. Most startups follow a three-step path: launch, revenue, profit. inDrive compressed that into a self-funding loop — generate revenue, retain profit, reinvest for growth. The alternative, he argues, is dangerous. “If there is a lot of VC fund involved in the business, then it is kind of an obligation for a business to go by the conditions set by the VC funds.” He connects this directly to what Pakistan has already witnessed: “When your growth is unsustainable and you have to meet the conditions and you cannot pivot, you run out of cash and you eventually have to leave the market.”

The company expanded from roughly seven countries to 40 between 2019 and 2022 — a three-year sprint funded largely by its own operations.

Why Pakistan, and why now

inDrive entered South Asia in 2019 and chose Pakistan as a priority market after on-the-ground research in Islamabad, Lahore, and Multan — conversations with passengers on the street and with drivers. The conclusion: product-market fit was already there.

Hasan adds a strategic layer. Ride-hailing is widely described as a winner-takes-all market. One player grabs the dominant share; others survive on scraps. But he argues the next move is predictable: the smaller players also chase the whole market, margins collapse for everyone, and the big players eventually merge or make truces. “Any other company which is a disruptor or a game changer jumps in the market, tweaks a bit with the business model, and takes this whole share again — and the winner-takes-all loop repeats.” His read of Pakistan in early 2021 was that the loop was ready to reset.

Islamabad was the launch city — high mobile penetration, good infrastructure, drivers already familiar with ride-hailing apps. What surprised the team was that drivers downloaded the app organically, without the heavy training campaigns inDrive had needed in other markets. The earlier players had done that work for them. “The training was provided to the drivers. Drivers knew the product, customers knew the product. We moved in with a slightly different model, trained on that, and saw a really amazing response.”

The response was strong enough that the original plan — Islamabad, then tier-two cities — was abandoned. “We decided we are going straight to Lahore and Karachi. We need to capture the market as soon as possible.”

The bargaining model and the commission question

The feature that most visibly differentiates inDrive is the bidding system. Passengers post a trip with a price they are willing to pay. Drivers see the request and counter with their own price. Both sides choose whether to accept. Muzamil notes that this maps onto a bargaining culture that already exists in Pakistan — the habit of negotiating a rate before agreeing to go anywhere.

Petrov is clear that this was not designed for Pakistan. “It is the basic thing in inDrive. inDrive was created around this option.” The model has been there from the start.

For the first period of operations in Pakistan, inDrive charged no commission at all. Hasan notes this was also a deliberate response to COVID-19: “Many people lost their jobs during COVID. We were providing jobs and not charging any commission.” Commission was only introduced roughly two months before this recording, and Hasan is emphatic that it remains among the lowest in the market. Drivers, he says, have accepted it: “If it is 10%, 15%, we are happy with that. It is fine. Obviously you have operational costs. But if it is extortionist and crossing the limits, then it doesn’t make sense.”

The business model works through driver balance top-ups. Drivers load credit into the app; when a ride is completed, commission is deducted from that balance. The rest stays with the driver.

Growth mechanics: digital-first, word-of-mouth, lean offices

Muzamil asks directly how inDrive fuelled expansion across 12 Pakistani cities in 18 months without large cash reserves. The answer from Hasan is a combination of factors, none of them flashy.

Customer acquisition ran almost entirely through digital channels — Facebook, Instagram, YouTube — with content for drivers produced in Roman Urdu so the audience could actually read it. Influencer marketing played a role; Muzamil mentions his own early campaign for inDrive, which he describes as casually executed but unexpectedly high-performing. “That has been one of the most viewed campaigns I’ve ever done.”

The more durable driver of growth, Hasan argues, was the network effect. “We are a multi-sided platform. The more users this network has, the more value it has. We have seen drivers telling customers: there is this new app in town, download it. And we have seen it from the passengers’ end as well.”

Decentralisation also helped. Petrov explains that each macro-region can make its own budget and launch decisions, tracking performance city by city and adjusting daily. “That helped a lot to reduce our customer acquisition costs.”

The rebranding: inDriver becomes inDrive

Later in the discussion, Sidra Kiran explains the October 2022 rebrand from inDriver to inDrive. The original name came from “independent drivers” — the idea that drivers work autonomously on the platform. As the company expanded globally and added verticals beyond ride-hailing, the name no longer captured what the business had become.

The rebrand happened simultaneously across 27 countries on a single day. “All our groups were flooded with pictures because globally our events were running,” Sidra says. The new name carries a different meaning — “intrinsic drive” — and a new slogan. The core mission, she is careful to add, did not change: fighting injustice, keeping prices fair, serving people who need it.

In Pakistan, inDrive currently operates four verticals: ride-hailing, intercity travel, cargo, and courier. Globally, the company also runs a home-services vertical covering tradespeople such as plumbers and electricians.

Safety, scam-busting, and the quadruple helix

Muzamil raises safety directly — specifically the risk to women passengers — and asks whether inDrive has plans for women-only services. Hasan walks through the existing mechanisms: verified driver documents, geotagged rides, an in-app panic button connected to emergency services (15 in Pakistan), one driver per account, and the ability to share live location with family or friends.

He also describes a fraud case the team uncovered internally. A group was using multiple phones to create fake rides and then awarding five-star ratings to inflate driver scores. “Our fraud prevention team — we call them our detectives — dismantled that racket.”

Sidra adds that inDrive launched a training programme in Mexico focused specifically on driver behaviour around women passengers — appropriate language, physical boundaries, body language. The programme had released five episodes at the time of recording, with plans to bring it to Pakistan.

Muzamil pushes on whether the company’s response to safety incidents is reactive or proactive. Hasan acknowledges the distinction matters. “I agree with you on the proactive part — it should be proactive on the part of the company to deal with such sensitive issues.” He says the support team operates 24/7, contacts affected customers, guides them through the steps to file an FIR, and cooperates with law enforcement. He frames the broader problem using what he calls the quadruple helix model — academia, society, industry, and government all need to engage together on issues that are, at root, societal rather than purely platform-specific.

Pakistan’s mobility deficit and the decade ahead

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil pulls the discussion toward the macro picture. He offers a calculation: over the next decade, Pakistan will add 10 million new households, while the country produces roughly 250,000 cars per year. At that rate, 2.5 million cars over ten years leaves a deficit of 7.5 million households with unmet transportation needs. “It is a no-brainer that you need to optimise. In developed economies there are a couple of cars in every garage used once a day. In Pakistan you need to maximise the utility of an average vehicle.”

Hasan places Pakistan inside inDrive’s Asia-Pacific region, which holds roughly 60% of the world’s population. Pakistan is the fourth-largest country in that region. He points to the youth demographic — 60 to 70% of Pakistan’s population is under 35 — as the natural user base: millennials and Gen Z with smartphones, no car of their own, and a need for affordable transport.

Internet penetration at 36%, concentrated in urban areas, is the ceiling on near-term expansion. Mobile penetration at 85% is the floor of opportunity. Petrov adds that Pakistan’s performance has already begun influencing inDrive’s global product roadmap: feature requests from the Pakistan team are now being prioritised at the highest level.

On the long-term future of the industry, Petrov is measured. He sees artificial intelligence eventually entering the bidding model — autonomous vehicles competing alongside human drivers for the same orders, with passengers choosing between them using the same price-negotiation system that inDrive has always used. The model, in other words, does not need to change. The supply side simply gets more varied.