Careem’s pitch deck that returned 100X for investors

Careem’s pitch deck started with the words “Disclaimer – this is a HIGH RISK investment!” but for those angel investors who saw the potential, it generated a 100X return.

Seven years ago, Careem was a startup looking for investors and seven years later it ended with a $3.1 billion deal. That deal was the largest tech acquisition in the history of the region and represented a lift-off moment for startups in our part of the world.

Here’s the deck – in full – that Careem’s founders were presenting to potential investors. It’s a little piece of tech history for the Middle East, but also an insight into how a multi-billion dollar startup secured the vital early funding.

This pitch deck helped to raise $1.7 million.

You can see in the second paragraph reference to captains’ ratings, based on the one-to-five star system. This was important to help grow confidence in the service and is still vital today as Careem continues to work on experience driven growth.

Here’s how Careem presented the details of how the app has a tech grid that provides real time transparency into car location, and the location-aware dispatching so the car nearest to you is sent, reducing waiting time for passenger and maximising the jobs for the captain.

This deck is from March 2013 and this slide shows the new feature of being able to ride right now rather than booking a car for a future time and date.

Back then the trips were split evenly between corporate clients and consumers, and the rapid growth (60 percent month-on-month) is also mentioned. It’s worth noting that we were talking about our 300+ drivers. Careem now has over 33 million drivers on the app across the entire region.