Pakistan based bus hailing service BusCaro has reached a major milestone, reporting profitability for the first time since its 2022 founding. The mobility company recorded positive EBITDA since April 2026, marking a significant turnaround from negative nine percent between Pakistan’s fiscal year of July 2024 and June 2025, with gross margins also expanding by 48 percent over the same period.
BusCaro reached this milestone in less than four years of operations, with a reported lifetime burn of just one point four million dollars, reflecting a notably capital efficient path to profitability compared to many venture backed startups. Since its founding, the company has partnered with organisations, schools, and institutions to provide daily commuting in a nation battling a persistent transport safety crisis, particularly for women and children, with more than thirty million bookings made to date, roughly ten million more than reported less than a year ago, including nine million bookings completed in the fourth year alone.
Founder and Chief Executive Officer Maha Shahzad credited her team above all else for the company’s turnaround, saying the goal was a safe, affordable way for women, men, and children to commute, and describing the biggest driver of the company’s success as the team behind it and their belief in what they were building, even when it looked unlikely they would make it over the line. She added that commute is a real and persistent need for everyone, and that the company’s resilience through more difficult quarters has created a culture of continuous operational improvement.
According to Shahzad, BusCaro’s annual revenue increased from four point five million dollars to six point five million dollars in its fourth year, while annual recurring revenue reached seven point one million dollars. The company also reduced operating expenses to single-digit percentages of gross merchandise value during this period, a notable tightening of unit economics alongside its broader profitability turnaround. These figures emerged against a difficult global backdrop of tightening funding, political conflict, and inflation that has made profitability increasingly hard for startups to achieve, making BusCaro’s turnaround particularly notable given the broader macroeconomic headwinds facing companies across emerging markets.
Customer loyalty has anchored the company’s growth throughout this period, with Shahzad noting that BusCaro has maintained 98 percent retention alongside 99.5 percent reliability across all bookings, with several customers having stayed with the company since its earliest days. The company currently serves multinational corporations, banks, hospitals, and airlines. Over the past year, BusCaro expanded beyond its four core markets of Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, and Rawalpindi into surrounding cities, while also launching an on-demand service allowing existing clients to request rides on an ad-hoc basis alongside routine commuting. Looking ahead, Shahzad said the company is now focused on launching new markets within Pakistan while laying the groundwork for international expansion, noting that its operating model is designed to be scalable and replicable across new markets, and that improving EV infrastructure is expected to support the expansion of electric fleets as the company scales.
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