Airlift

» see airlifttech.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Airlift started in March 2019 as a bus. Usman Gul, back in Lahore and stuck in its traffic, put 50,000 dollars of his own money into a service running fixed-route minibuses you hailed from a phone, on the reasoning that a city with no working mass transit would take a privately operated version of one. It moved quickly. Around 50,000 riders were using it in Lahore inside five months, a 2.2 million dollar seed closed in August 2019, and a 12 million dollar Series A with First Round Capital in it followed that November.

Then COVID arrived and nobody wanted to sit in a shared van. The company turned to grocery delivery under the name Airlift Express, out of warehouses it stocked itself, on a promise of delivery inside thirty minutes. That was the model every quick commerce company on earth was running in 2020 and 2021, and capital was flowing into it faster than into anything else on the board.

In August 2021 Airlift raised 85 million dollars at a valuation of 275 million, led by Harry Stebbings of 20VC and Josh Buckley, with First Round and Indus Valley Capital alongside. It was the largest round any startup had raised in Pakistan, and the coverage read it as proof the country's technology sector had arrived. Total money into the company passed 110 million dollars. Eleven months later the company was gone.

~ the case file ~

~ thirty minutes ~

Quick commerce is a Turkish invention, which is the strange part of watching it take down a Pakistani company. Getir started in Istanbul in 2015 promising groceries at your door in ten minutes, and by 2021 it was a multi-billion-dollar business exporting the format to London and New York. Everything Airlift was doing in Lahore that year was the same machine: small warehouses sitting close to the customer and a courier fleet on motorcycles, with a clock counting down inside the app.

The economics of that machine were never good anywhere. A thirty-minute promise means paying for warehouse rent and for couriers standing around waiting, against an order small enough that somebody will place it for a single item. The entire sector ran on a belief that scale would fix the unit economics later on. When capital stopped arriving in the first half of 2022, every company built on that belief found out at roughly the same time, and the ones without a deep balance sheet found out first.

~ the dark stores ~

At its widest Airlift ran about 80 dark stores, 23 of them opened in Lahore inside three months. It covered eight Pakistani cities and had pushed into three South African ones. Headcount passed 300 in the corporate office alone, with several thousand more working the warehouses and the bikes.

The retreat began in May 2022. The company cut 31 percent of its workforce in what it called a strategic realignment and closed South Africa. Gul's account afterward was that the business had reached order-level profitability and cut its burn by 66 percent, and that it was roughly three months from operating profitability when the money stopped. In early July a round at a 500 million dollar valuation was close. Investors then went quiet on wire dates and the commitments never converted.

~ what was left owed ~

Staff were told on the evening of Tuesday 12 July 2022 that operations would end permanently the following day, and on 13 July they did. Riders and warehouse workers were the largest group the company employed and the least protected of them. They spent the next year chasing money they were owed, and Rest of World was still reporting on unpaid Airlift workers in 2023. The apex domain now answers with a few hundred bytes of parking lander, and so does the South African one. Two landers in two countries is a tidy accounting of how much of the 110 million dollars is still standing.

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