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 9% between Pakistan’s fiscal year of July 2024 and June 2025.
BusCaro reached this milestone in less than four years of operations, with a reported lifetime burn of just $1.4 million. Since its founding, the company has partnered with organizations, schools, and institutions to provide daily commuting in a nation battling a persistent transport safety crisis, particularly for women and children. More than 30 million bookings have been made to date, roughly 10 million more than reported less than a year ago.
Founder and CEO Maha Shahzad credited her team above all else:
“What we wanted was a safe, affordable way for women to commute. For men to commute. For children to commute. We launched BusCaro to do just that… The biggest driver has been the team behind it and their belief in what they’re building. They’ve kept going even when it looked very unlikely we’d make it over the line.”
According to Shahzad, BusCaro’s annual revenue increased from $4.5 million to $6.5 million in its fourth year, while annual recurring revenue reached $7.1 million. 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.
Customer loyalty has anchored the company’s growth throughout this period. As Shahzad puts it:
This relentless focus on the customer and operational excellence is why our customers stay. Several of our customers have been with us since day one and across all bookings we have maintained 99.5% reliability. Simply put, our customers have no reason to leave.
Over the past year, BusCaro expanded beyond its four core markets of Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, and Rawalpindi into surrounding cities. The company also launched an on-demand service, letting existing clients 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. She added that the fiscal year’s start provides a key opportunity to win corporate accounts reassessing employee commute budgets, as BusCaro capitalizes on rising fuel prices and expanding EV infrastructure pushing commuters toward shared transport.
