Truck It In raised $17.5 million to replace the phone call to the broker
Three former Careem executives built a freight marketplace and raised $17.5 million within 13 months of starting commercial operations. Its last published customer count dates from June 2022, and it has never published a price.
Truck It In raised $17.5 million within 13 months of starting commercial operations in January 2021. Its last published customer count is 600 businesses, from June 2022, and it has never said what it charges. Together they show how hard it is to replace the phone call between a shipper and a broker with an app.
From Careem to the truck stand
The founders are Muhammad Sarmad Farooq, who is chief executive, Raza Afzal and Haider Navid, all former executives of the ride hailing company Careem. They ran a pilot in September 2020 and began commercial operations in January 2021. By September 2021 the company said it had grown more than 18 times since the pilot. It gave no starting figure, so the multiple says little about size.
The problem they chose is the broker. Afzal described the shipper's side of it when the company extended its first round.
“Shippers had to spend hours on phone calls with brokers to find someone to pick their load.”
The company's website lists what it offers each side. Shippers get live tracking, best rates, a reliable fleet and analytics. Truckers get instant loads, no hidden fees, fleet efficiency and what it calls round trip assurance. The last item is the one that changes a truck owner's income. A truck that carries a load to a distant city and drives home empty is paid for one leg of a two leg journey, so a marketplace that can find a return load raises what the same truck earns.
Three announcements in 10 months
The money came quickly. On 13 April 2021 the company announced a $1.5 million pre seed round. On 7 September it added $3 million, led by Global Founders Capital and Fatima Gobi Ventures with Picus Capital and Zayn Capital taking part, which took the pre seed to $4.5 million. On 4 February 2022 it announced a $13 million seed round led by the same two funds, with Wamda, Graph Ventures, ADB Ventures, i2i Ventures and others taking part. Total capital stood at $17.5 million. The company called the seed round the largest in the trucking space across the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan, and said revenue had grown 37 times in the previous year. Again no base figure was given, so the multiple cannot be turned into rupees.
Farooq said the seed money would go into hiring across all functions, with a focus on engineers. That sentence matters for what came next.
What a $1 billion saving means
The pitch behind the cheques was scale. The company puts Pakistan's road freight industry at $25 billion and aims to help more than 3 million businesses save $1 billion a year in supply chain inefficiencies. Both numbers are the company's own, and the saving is a target, not a result. Two pieces of arithmetic put it in proportion.
First, $1 billion is 4 percent of $25 billion. That is a plausible margin for a service that removes a middleman, and it is a sensible size of claim for a startup to make. Second, $1 billion spread across 3 million businesses is about $333 a year each. The target group is small shippers and small truckers, and for them $333 is a modest sum.
What Truck It In itself would earn is a fraction of that. Every 10 percent of the saving kept as a fee would be worth $100 million a year, but only if all 3 million businesses signed up and each saved the average. If one in ten of them joined and the company kept 5 percent of what they saved, revenue would be $5 million a year. The company has not published its fee, so no one outside can say where on that range it sits.
The reset of June 2022
On 1 June 2022, four months after the seed round, Truck It In announced what it called a business optimisation. Citing global economic uncertainty, it said it would recalibrate its strategy and serve shippers and truckers in a leaner way. It offered severance packages and help finding other work. ProPakistani, citing sources, put the cut at about 30 percent of staff. The company did not confirm that figure, and it did not say how many people it employed.
The statement did give two numbers. In the previous year, it said, the company had optimised logistics for more than 600 businesses and digitised thousands of truckers. Those are the last customer figures it has published. The statement did not say how many of the 600 booked more than once.
The sequence is short. In February the company said it would hire engineers across all functions. In June it was reducing staff and describing its model as leaner.
What the website says now
The company's domain, truckitin.com, now redirects to truckitin.ai. The home page carries no figures on shipments, fleet size, routes, savings or users. The only date on it is a 2025 copyright line. A section headed Power your Logistics with AI invites visitors to get in touch but does not describe any software.
A page of posts tagged Pakistani logistics on the same site says the marketplace offers an average of more than 300 daily load opportunities across Pakistan. The post is undated. A load opportunity is a load posted for trucks to take, not a load that was moved, and the company does not say how many were booked or at what price.
On price, the site is silent for shippers. Truckers are told there are no hidden fees, which says nothing about the visible ones. Neither the 2021 and 2022 announcements nor the site names a commission, a fee per trip or a subscription.
A marketplace that replaces brokers can fail in two ways. If it charges less than the broker, it needs very large volume to pay for its software and staff. If it charges the same, a shipper has little reason to leave the phone. The numbers that settle it are the share of posted loads that get booked, how many shippers book again, and how often a truck finds a load for the return leg. Truck It In has published none of them.
Its website now carries a 2025 copyright line, and no figure on it is newer than 2022.
