Pakistan’s highest-valued startup Airlift has gone bust.
The Lahore-based instant-delivery startup will permanently shut down on July 13, according to two company employees, including one executive.
The company confirmed the decision to shut its business in a statement to Rest of World. “While the global recession and recent downturn in capital markets has affected economic activity across the board, it has had a devastating impact on Airlift and rendered its shut-down inevitable,” it said. “On July 12, Airlift’s operations will shut down permanently. This has been an extremely taxing decision that impacts a large set of stakeholders and an emerging technology ecosystem.”
Less than a year ago Airlift was flying high and had raised $85 million in a Series B funding round, the highest single round of investment raised by any startup in Pakistan. The country’s Prime Minister tweeted a congratulatory note to the three-year-old startup, and billboard ads for Airlift were plastered across the country. At the time, the company was considered Pakistan’s best shot at a unicorn.
But the company’s fortunes changed due to the global startup funding crunch and some bad business decisions that increased its operating costs. In May, Airlift announced a “strategic realignment,” laying off nearly one-third of its workforce and cutting operations from eight cities, to just three. It had also shut its business in South Africa.
Airlift was launched in 2019 as a mass transit service that operated an Uber-like service for buses in Pakistan. As the Covid-19 pandemic hit the country, Airlift scrapped its transit service and quickly pivoted to grocery delivery.
This is a breaking story which will be updated as news emerges.
Pakistan's highest-valued startup Airlift has gone bust. The Lahore-based instant-delivery startup will permanently shut down on July 13, according to two company employees, including one executive. The company confirmed the decision to shut its business in a statement to Rest of World
Rest of World
Rest of World is a nonprofit publication that challenges expectations about whose experiences with technology matter. We connect the dots across a rapidly evolving digital world, through on-the-ground reporting in places typically overlooked and underestimated.
In a statement to Rest of World at the time, the company said the global recession and downturn in capital markets “had a devastating impact on Airlift and rendered its shut-down inevitable.” The company had at least hundreds of delivery riders across multiple cities in Pakistan.
It was founded in March 2019. It closed all operations on 13 July 2022. Customers of the company used a mobile application or website to order groceries and essentials online, and airlift and secure the items from their warehouse, delivering the items to the consumer within 30 minutes.
On July 12, 2022, Airlift sent shock waves across the Pakistani startup community as it announced that it was shutting down permanently. The company's investors had pulled out of a fresh funding round, and around 300 corporate employees, and thousands of warehouse and delivery staff, were jobless overnight.
And this is exactly what happened with Airlift too." “The company didn't have the runway.They needed money in this environment but failed to raise it,” he said, adding that a company as fast-growing as Airlift was just "in the wrong place at the wrong time".
KARACHI: Quick commerce startup Airlift is shutting down permanently, online publication Deal Street Asia reported late on Tuesday. Airlift was initially a bus service that later pivoted to the last-mile delivery segment. It raised $85 million last year in the largest funding round by any local startup.
The top three of Airlift's competitors in the Shipping And Fulfillment category are FedEx with 41.20%, Magento Shipping with 37.72%, Sendcloud with 6.74% market share.
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“Less than a week into the negotiations, Airlift's coffers had dried up and the company had no option but to wind down its business,” the report said. At the core of it, Airlift was running a hyper-growth model which could not be sustained in the absence of large funding injections such as the $85 million round.
In a post on Twitter founder and CEO Zuleyka Strasner said the company was “chronically undercapitalized.” Now a number of Bay Area food businesses tell the Chronicle the company owes them money.
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Airlift's pitch of international expansion has also been similar to other startups in quick commerce that have become unicorns and with all of that combined, it isn't surprising that Airlift was able to raise $350 million and get unicorn status.
From $1.4 million in Q1 2021, Airlift reached $16.9 million in gross revenue in the last quarter of the year, clocking in at $33 million in gross revenue for the entire year.
Air Lift's annual revenue is $8.5M. Zippia's data science team found the following key financial metrics about Air Lift after extensive research and analysis. Air Lift has 150 employees, and the revenue per employee ratio is $56,980. Air Lift peak revenue was $8.5M in 2023.
The challenges faced by e-commerce startups in Pakistan are diverse and contribute to a high failure rate in the region. 1. Inadequate research and development: Pose significant challenges for startups, especially in the e-commerce sector.
Airlift scaled Pakistan's largest decentralized transportation network to change the way people move, shifting away from private vehicles towards shared mobility and affordable mass transport.
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