The trucker's son who raised $17.5M to fix freight

A small-town boy with a trucking family

The episode opens with Muzamil noting that he had been chasing this guest for six to eight months. The reason becomes clear quickly: Muhammad Sarmad Farooq is not the typical Islamabad or Lahore startup founder. He was born in Talagang, a tehsil roughly ninety minutes from Mianwali in central Punjab, and he spent his entire early life there.

That origin matters more than it might seem. Sarmad explains that sixty to seventy percent of his extended family was in the transport business, and most of the rest had joined the armed forces. A handful of cousins had gone on to Amazon, Facebook, and Careem. The result was an unusual dual exposure: the realities of rural Pakistan on one side, and the possibilities of the tech economy on the other.

“Wahan par mujhe jo logon ke masail pata chalte the — Pakistan ka sahi scale, Pakistan ki real problems — woh pata chal rahe hote hain,” he says. (The problems people faced there — Pakistan’s real scale, Pakistan’s real problems — those became visible to you.) Muzamil pushes on this, noting that most startup founders he meets come from a narrow urban corridor and are, as a result, building for a narrow urban market. Sarmad’s background is the exception.

Manufacturing engineering, by accident

Sarmad’s path to GIK Institute was not planned. His first preference was mechanical engineering, but his merit number did not qualify him for it. He ended up in manufacturing engineering — a degree focused on industrial operations, materials science, and production systems — largely because a senior from his area told him the scholarships and internship pipelines were good.

He is candid about the mismatch. “Mujhe kuch bhi pucho engineering ka, main basic engineering ki definition par hi blackout kar jaunga,” he says. (Ask me anything about engineering, I’ll blank out even on the basic definition.) What GIK did give him, he argues, was four years inside a self-contained environment — hostels, sports, concerts, a tight social circle — that taught him how to operate under pressure and build relationships. He spent two summers making up failed courses and graduated in 2015 with a 2.38 GPA.

During university, he was already running side experiments: investing small amounts in the stock market, importing refurbished electronics from China and selling them to wholesalers. In his fourth year, he won a business idea competition and was inducted into GIK’s second incubator batch with a ride-hailing concept he tested under the name Desi Sawari.

Five years at Careem, across three countries

Sarmad joined Careem as what was then called a fleet manager — effectively the first employee to launch Islamabad. He describes the early role as everything at once: supply acquisition, driver incentive design, pricing, regulatory engagement, crisis management. There was no admin team, no separate analytics function. Everything ran through the city unit.

Over five years, he never stayed in one role for more than three months. He headed fleet ventures, running a subsidised loan programme with JS Bank under the Prime Minister’s Youth Business Loan scheme — a model where Careem’s data on driver earnings kept default rates lower than conventional bank benchmarks. He then moved to Dubai to lead food delivery expansion across Saudi Arabia, launching in Riyadh, Jeddah, Dammam, Makkah, and Madinah. His final role was head of commercial for last-mile delivery in Saudi, where Careem ran fulfilment operations for Amazon, Noon, and grocery and pharmaceutical retailers.

“Pehle teen chaar saal mein obviously zyada operational tha — kitni speed se execute karna hai, kitna acha execute karna hai,” he says. The last phase, working under a line manager with a McKinsey background, added a different layer: how to structure complex problems, how to build strategy, how to think at scale.

Muzamil asks why the last-mile-as-a-service model that worked so well in Saudi was never replicated in Pakistan. Sarmad’s answer is direct: the average trip fare in Saudi, in dollar terms, was significantly higher, and the market was more digitised. Pakistan’s margins at the time did not justify the effort relative to what he could see in trucking.

The broken market Sarmad grew up watching

Before getting into how Truck It In works, Muzamil asks Sarmad to explain what his family’s trucking business actually looked like. The answer is a detailed portrait of an industry that has barely changed in forty years.

Fleet owners in the Talagang-Mianwali belt own twenty-two-wheeler flatbeds that carry wheat, cotton bales, steel, and other commodities between cities. In the 1980s, when Sarmad’s father was operating, the matching system worked like this: a fleet owner would contact a broker, who was connected to a set of demand aggregators called adda owners, who maintained handwritten registers of available loads. The adda owner would match loads to vehicles by calling out names in a room. Every layer took a commission. No one had visibility beyond their immediate network.

“Saat saal ka bacha, achanak se landline par call aati hai — idhar gaadi agwa ho gayi, idhar maal chori ho gaya, idhar driver ki death ho gayi,” Sarmad recalls. (A seven-year-old child, and suddenly a landline call comes in — the truck was hijacked here, the cargo was stolen there, a driver died there.) He watched his father manage those crises in real time, deal with drivers’ families, coordinate with petrol station owners and hotel operators who were the informal support network of the road freight world.

That childhood observation became the foundation of Truck It In’s thesis.

How the platform actually works

Later in the discussion, Muzamil presses Sarmad on the mechanics of the business. The core problem Truck It In is solving is price discovery and vehicle discovery. In the old system, a factory logistics manager might spend twelve to eighteen hours making calls through multiple broker layers before getting a confirmed rate — and even then, the rate would often change when the truck actually arrived.

On the platform, a factory posts a demand. Within ten to fifteen minutes, four to five bids arrive from fleet owners. The factory selects the lowest bid. The rate is locked. Backouts — cases where a fleet owner wins a bid and then refuses to honour it — run at less than three percent.

Truck It In went to the demand side first. “Hum logon ne P&G, Unilever, choti factories, steel ke andar — hum toh koi nau ya das industries ko serve kar rahe hain abhi,” Sarmad explains. By owning the demand relationship directly, they bypassed the adda owner layer entirely. On the supply side, they onboard both brokers and fleet owners directly.

Revenue comes from a margin incorporated into the bid price that the factory sees. If a fleet owner bids one hundred thousand rupees, the factory sees one hundred and ten thousand. The platform collects from the customer side, not the supply side. For large corporates like Unilever or Nestle, payment terms run sixty to ninety days. For smaller SMEs, cash collection happens through on-ground agents at the unloading site. Ninety percent of the business is concentrated in the top eight cities, where Truck It In has physical presence.

Muzamil asks about brokers — whether they were being cut out. Sarmad says brokers are still on the platform. But he notes a consistent pattern in the data: after three transactions through a broker, fleet owners almost always begin exploring a direct relationship on the fourth trip. The platform’s value becomes self-evident.

Working capital is the real ceiling

One of the sharpest moments in the conversation comes when Muzamil asks about scale. Sarmad’s answer is not about product or market acceptance. It is about money.

“Working capital I think ek major hai,” he says. Factories pay on sixty-to-ninety-day credit terms. Truckers need payment at or near delivery. The platform absorbs that float. At scale, that float becomes a significant constraint — one that conventional banks cannot easily solve because they require collateral that a startup cannot provide.

Sarmad sees fintech as the unlock. As invoice factoring and supply-chain finance products mature in Pakistan, freight platforms will be able to offload the working capital problem to third parties and focus entirely on marketplace growth. He points to the US market, where payments and invoicing startups focused purely on trucking are still raising pre-seed and seed rounds, as evidence that this is a genuinely hard, genuinely large problem.

The seventeen and a half million dollars raised across pre-seed and seed rounds went primarily into two buckets: product infrastructure and people. Sarmad is clear that the fundraising environment of 2021 shaped the ambition — capital was available, rounds were closing fast, and plans that might have taken five years were being compressed into one. The market has since changed, and the focus has shifted toward sustainability.

The data layer and what comes next

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil and Sarmad move into the longer-term picture. Muzamil raises the example of FarmDar, another company backed by one of Truck It In’s investors, which uses satellite imagery to tell mills how much crop is harvestable and where. His point is that when FarmDar knows a harvest is ready to move, the logical next step is an automatic order generation that flows directly into Truck It In’s system.

Sarmad agrees completely. “Hum log as a transport management solution bilkul FarmDar aur yeh sab ke solutions ke saath ja sakte hain,” he says. The vision is an integrated supply chain where production data, transport demand, and fleet availability are connected without manual intervention. He is careful to note that this is a future state — digital penetration in both sectors is still too low for these integrations to be meaningful today — but the direction is clear.

He also addresses the asset-heavy versus asset-light question. In India, both Rivigo (which owns assets) and BlackBuck (which does not) have become unicorns. Sarmad’s view is that these models are complementary, not competitive, and that Pakistan’s road freight market is large enough to support multiple approaches. What matters is picking a specific problem, building a scalable solution, and then connecting with adjacent players through integrations rather than trying to own the entire stack.

Muzamil wraps up by asking Sarmad what Pakistan looks like in twenty-eight years. The answer is measured optimism: a fully digital economy, AI integrated into every major industry, and the current generation of problems solved — replaced by new ones. “Hamare paas choice hi nahi hai positive rehne ke alawa,” Sarmad says. (We have no choice but to stay positive.) He adds that every passing year, Pakistan produces better talent, and that the information gap between a developer in a developing market and one in a developed market has effectively closed.

Muzamil closes by noting what he finds most compelling about Truck It In: in a startup ecosystem that overwhelmingly builds for urban consumers, this is a company whose product runs on the roads that connect every corner of the country — and whose founder grew up watching those roads from the inside.