Careem Tried to Build a System. Pakistan Gave It a Vibe.

Careem’s exit doesn’t mark the end of a startup, it marks the end of pretending there was ever an ecosystem to begin with.

In 2015, Careem launched in Karachi with a mission statement that read like a promise: reliability, safety, dignity. You could tap a button and summon a ride — no haggling, no staring uncles, no judgment. For a brief moment, it felt like the future had arrived in a country still arguing over change for a hundred rupee note.

Now it’s leaving. Quietly. Not with scandal or failure, just exhaustion.

On July 18, Careem will suspend its ride-hailing service in Pakistan, nine years after it arrived with venture capital and good intentions. It helped normalize digital payments. It made it easier for women to commute. It got people used to the idea that tech could simplify daily life. But in the end, it made a familiar mistake. It confused surface change with structural possibility.

Because what Careem encountered wasn’t just economic headwinds or a tough market. It hit something deeper. The unspoken truth of Pakistan’s tech scene: the app is just a mask. Behind the dashboards and discount codes, the reality is still informal, extractive, and unstable. The startup ecosystem didn’t fail. It never existed.

There’s a specific type of optimism that floats around the global startup circuit. It thrives on panels, pitch decks, and press releases. “Pakistan is at an inflection point,” they say. “A young population, mobile-first, underpenetrated.” The slides practically write themselves. Every problem is an opportunity. Every inefficiency is a market.

But that language only makes sense in a world where rules exist. Where contracts are enforced. Where the legal system functions. Where payments clear on time. Where data is reliable. Where the middle class isn’t evaporating in real time.

Careem wasn’t naive. It understood the gaps. It tried to build bridges — through localization, partnerships, driver support. But what it underestimated was how much of Pakistan’s economy runs on vibes and workaround. On cash under the table. On favors. On feudal relationships dressed up as entrepreneurship. You can’t scale trust when the social contract is broken. You can’t algorithm your way out of arbitrariness.

So people gravitated to InDrive — an app that lets you haggle with drivers before pickup. It’s technically a regression, but it works. It reflects how people already operate. No illusions. No layers. Just a digital interface over the same old dance.

The irony is, Careem succeeded in ways that weren’t measurable. It made people feel something. For a few years, it offered a glimpse of what functional systems could look like. You could sit in a clean car, track your ride, and pay with your phone. It felt normal. That was the real disruption. Not technology. Not GDP contribution. But dignity.

But dignity doesn’t show up on a balance sheet. It doesn’t keep investors patient when currency tanks or inflation hits 38%. It doesn’t matter when macroeconomic indicators look like a polygraph test gone wrong. The market corrects for sentiment. And when sentiment dies, exits follow.

Uber saw it in 2022. Careem waited longer. Maybe because it was born in the region. Maybe because it still believed the story. But belief isn’t capital. And belief doesn’t fix broken infrastructure, or political volatility, or predatory taxation. Eventually, belief runs out of runway.

The real problem isn’t that Careem left. It’s that its departure won’t spark any reckoning. There will be no serious discussion about why platforms fail. No review of regulatory capture. No interrogation of the informal economy’s chokehold on formal enterprise. Just another shrug, another headline, another “chalta hai, hota hai.”

Meanwhile, the performance layer remains.

Incubators will keep hosting demo days. Panels will keep quoting TAM and growth potential. Startups will keep announcing seed rounds like they’re silver medals for trying. And the press will keep calling it an ecosystem.

But it’s not. It’s a stage set. The real economy is elsewhere — in the cash economy, the land mafia, the unrecorded trade. In the daily improvisation that makes life barely livable but not buildable.

You can’t build a startup on top of a broken state. You can’t import efficiency into dysfunction. And you can’t pitch resilience when the rules change mid-slide.

That’s the contradiction at the heart of Pakistan’s digital fantasy. It dreams of exits and unicorns, but runs on delayed payments and cousin connections. It celebrates hustle, but penalizes scale. It wants the shine of Dubai with the governance of… well, Pakistan.

It’s not just a funding problem. It’s not just inflation. It’s a deeper failure of imagination. A refusal to face the fact that systems don’t grow out of pitch decks. They require law, stability, trust. And above all, time.

Careem gave it nine years. I gave it ten years. That’s longer than most governments last.

It tried to outlast the chaos. But eventually, it became clear: the market wasn’t maturing. It was reverting. What looked like a step forward was really a pause between breakdowns.

And maybe that’s the lesson. Not everything is a market waiting to be unlocked. Some places are not temporarily unstable — they are structurally incompatible with the fantasies projected onto them. Not permanently. But for now.

No one wants to admit that. It’s easier to tweet through it. To post a farewell with phrases like “capital constraints” and “macroeconomic headwinds.” As if this were just a blip.

But it wasn’t a blip. It was the reality asserting itself.