Roshni Rides, a Pakistan-based leading tech startup that provides a carpooling solution specifically to children and women has recently acqui-hired talent from NextGenI, a leading consulting firm that specializes in building technology product teams for clients in Western Europe, GCC, and Pakistan.
Announced on 25th October, at DotZero Karachi, NextGenI’s Founder Farzal Dojki kick-started the ceremony by reminiscing his invigorating journey of working with startups and building their technology team over the past five years. While talking to TechJuice, he said, “Acquihires in the technology space are the digital version of ‘Build, Operate & Transfer’ and NextGenI has now executed this 4 times in the past 4 years, both in Pakistan and UAE.”
The trend of acqui-hiring talent for startups is relatively new especially in Pakistan where one company ‘Aqui-hires’ the talent from another company to build an in-house team, mainly to scale the product faster than they would otherwise by painstakingly hiring each individual team member.
Now ready to grow and scale their product, Roshni Rides’ Co-founder, Moneeb Mian continued the talk by sharing how it was a huge responsibility on the shoulders of four fresh graduates (the team) when they were given 1 Million USD from the Hult prize to build an impactful business.
When asked about his journey to this acquihire, he mentioned that ” Working with the NGI team was a great experience. Professionalism and enthusiasm for our product shown by NextGenI team is what led us to acqui-hiring this talent and we are proud to say that right now, we are nearly breaking-even on 80% of our fleet due to our laser focus on product quality.”
The team being acqui-hired also shared their experience working on the Roshni Rides platform. “It was not just an ordinary software development work but a great learning experience. As a team, we all are very proud to be a part of a startup that is solving an important problem for women in our country.” shared Bari, a software engineer from the acqui-hired team.
For Pakistan, this is a really positive development for tech founders and investors looking at Pakistan as a hub for high-quality software development talent. Just over the course of the last three years, Pakistan became home to Unicorns like Affinity, Careem, and KeepTruckin and soon after that, this acqui-hire deal of Roshni Rides with NextGenI is a refreshing step for new startups to follow.
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