How Rider tried to make Pakistan's online orders actually arrive

When Salman Allana started Rider in Karachi in 2019, a parcel ordered on Instagram or an early ecommerce site was a gamble. Before Rider launched, only 80 to 85 percent of deliveries in Pakistan reached the customer's door, according to a 2021 report on the company's first round. TCS and Leopards Courier dominated courier delivery, with TCS still holding most of the market. Both had moved toward ecommerce deliveries, but Allana argued that traditional couriers were not set up to serve the ecommerce market. The online seller, usually a small shop run from a phone, was an awkward customer for them.

"If you ordered something online, you accepted the huge risk it might never show up," Allana told TechCrunch in 2022. His plan was to sell those sellers a reliable next day service and build the logistics network around them, hub by hub, with software running through it.

A founder who had studied the problem

Allana grew up in Karachi and began his career in sub Saharan Africa. After an MBA in London he became head of strategy and business development at UPS Pakistan, and he had earlier been an assistant vice president at Citi. At UPS he saw at close range that traditional carriers were not set up to serve online retail. He is the son of Sultan Ali Allana, the chairman of Habib Bank Limited.

The company he built around that experience is a business to business to consumer courier, a model it calls B2B2C. Sellers hand parcels to Rider, Rider moves them through sorting hubs and urban delivery centres, and a fleet of riders completes the last stretch. The centres were improvised: mobile warehouses in the form of pre sorted vans, spare space in mall parking lots and petrol stations, and, in the plan, corner shops, the kiryana stores that anchor Pakistani neighbourhoods.

Money, then Y Combinator

Rider announced a $2.3 million seed round on 20 October 2021. Global Founders Capital, Fatima Gobi Ventures and the Asian Development Bank led it, with TPL's venture arm and Transhold taking part. At that point Rider said it had more than 500 drivers, had delivered 1.5 million ecommerce parcels with a 93 percent success rate, and counted the five biggest online retailers in the country, among them Khaadi and Daraz, as clients. It offered sellers repayment of cash collected on delivery within 24 hours.

It then joined the Winter 2022 batch of Y Combinator, which the company described as making it Pakistan's first logistics business backed by the accelerator. In June 2022 it announced a further $3.1 million, taking its seed funding to $5.4 million. Y Combinator, i2i Ventures, Flexport, Soma Capital and Rebel Fund were new investors, and Global Founders Capital, Fatima Gobi Ventures and TPL's venture arm returned. Arash Ferdowsi, a cofounder of Dropbox, invested as an angel.

Rebel Fund's managing partner, Jared Heyman, said Rider was the fund's first investment in Pakistan. Kalsoom Lakhani of i2i Ventures said the firm believed Rider was the "next generation 3PL player" the market needed, using the industry term for an outsourced logistics provider. The company said its core team included former executives of Alibaba, Delivery Hero and Jumo.

What the numbers said in 2022

Monthly revenue had grown 110 percent since the first round, Rider said with the June announcement. Its base of online sellers had doubled to 650. It had delivered more than 3 million parcels across 60 cities through a network of 16 hubs, which Allana said covered about 60 percent of Pakistan's ecommerce demand.

Rider also sold payments, not just transport. Its wallet reconciled cash collected on delivery so that sellers were paid within hours. In January 2022 it piloted business to business trucking over longer distances. Allana put the size of the problem at about $1 billion of merchandise lost each year to failed and slow deliveries, in a retail industry he valued at more than $150 billion that remained largely offline. He said the company wanted to help more than a million sellers, mainly women running businesses on Instagram and Facebook, trade online.

Allana said his company had been careful about costs from the start. "From day one, we have been very aware of our cost components," he told Profit. Money was about to get scarcer. Venture funding in Pakistan fell to $6.8 million in the third quarter of 2023, down 87.7 percent from $55 million a year earlier, which is the backdrop to everything Rider tried next.

The BlueEx bid

In October 2023 Rider said it was looking to acquire the ecommerce courier business of BlueEx, then listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange as Universal Network Systems Limited. Allana said the deal was not an acquisition of the whole listed company, only of the unit that traded under the BlueEx brand. No price was disclosed. He said the combined business would be the third largest ecommerce logistics player in the country and aimed to reach one million orders a month for more than 3,000 merchants across about 700 delivery locations. It would have been the first acquisition of a listed company by a Pakistani startup.

Universal Network Systems had also told the exchange that it had received an offer from TPL Logistics for its domestic ecommerce division, and its board named a director to oversee negotiations. The company changed its name to BlueEx Limited in January 2024, and in December 2025 it became the first firm to move from the exchange's growth board to its Ready board.

Where it stands

Rider has not announced a round since the June 2022 extension, and its website returned a service error on 23 October. Public reporting does not say whether the BlueEx bid was signed or withdrawn. What is documented is the model: a Karachi courier that tried to make cash collection, tracking and delivery promises one product for small online sellers, and funded its growth in steps rather than at once.