Tim DraperFounder and Managing Partne, Draper Associate · I back the ideas that look crazy first

In many countries, women don’t have safe public transport options

23 Mar 2025 · 2 min

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1:38

This content was created by Tim Draper. This content was uploaded by Tim Draper. This is a YouTube video titled "In many countries, women don’t have safe public transport options" (published 2025-03-23T10:30:01Z). The excerpt is a multi-speaker Q&A or pitch-style discussion (participants labeled SPEAKER A–E, with one person addressed as "Maha") about a transportation service/startup. Speakers discuss passenger harassment on buses versus ride-hailing, driver training and ride monitoring, target markets (Pakistan as a 250M-person first market, and future expansion to KSA and UAE), a focus on school/children’s transportation inefficiencies, using AI to optimize routes for organizations, operating cadence (mainly weekdays), current scale (~35,000 bookings per day) and potential 5x scalability. The tone is interactive with questions, rebuttals, and operational/market details.

Maha, I know you're training the bus drivers. The usual harassment comes from the other passengers in the bus. So how are you tackling that?
So if you look at the statistics, generally the kind of cases that have been seen have been with ride-hailing, and that's generally because it's one driver and one passenger at a time. And what we're also doing is constantly monitoring every single ride.
So I am going to ask you about this. If it's just for Pakistan, that's probably not good enough.
How are you defining a large market? 'Cause I have a 250 million population in my first market alone. I already have more of a pipeline than I can take on. That's not good enough.
And your future markets are KSA, UAE. Those are really safe countries. So let me give you— They don't have any incidents. So what's your pitch there? Sure.
Let me give you a rebuttal to that. First of all, if you look at Pakistan alone, that's 250 million. I think there's a billion-dollar business easily to be built there. When we talk about KSA and UAE, it's not safety that we're trying to solve for. It's going after the children's market. So if you look at schools Transportation in both of those countries, that's currently very inefficient, and kids are spending close to 2 hours a day just getting to school or coming back.
When you deal with a business, their employees could be spread out over a large area. Correct. Do they stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, then bring them in?
Yes. So what we're going to do is if there's an organization, we're going to get data on where their employees are. We're going to use AI to build the most optimized routes, and then we're going to run those buses on that.
Is your service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week?
It's generally Monday to Friday, in some cases Saturday. And we are today now doing about 35,000 bookings a day.
35,000 a day?
Yes. And that could be scaled 5x.