Careem's Strange Second Act: How Uber Is Quietly Buying Back the UAE's Biggest Super App

Careem's Strange Second Act: How Uber Is Quietly Buying Its Way Back Into the UAE's Biggest Super App

Careem is the rare regional tech story that has already lived three lives: the scrappy Dubai startup that out-hustled Uber on its home turf, the $3.1 billion trophy acquisition that made it the Gulf's first unicorn outside Israel, and now, in 2026, a split-up super app that Uber is methodically buying back piece by piece. For a company most people in the UAE still associate with a single ride-hailing app, the actual ownership chart has become one of the more interesting case studies in regional tech.

From Dubai Startup to the Region's First Unicorn

Careem was founded in Dubai in 2012 by Mudassir Sheikha and Magnus Olsson, two former McKinsey consultants who bet that the Gulf and wider MENA region needed a ride-hailing service built for local conditions rather than a copy-pasted Silicon Valley app. Abdulla Elyas joined as a third co-founder in 2015 after Careem acquired his Saudi-based delivery startup, enwani.

The timing mattered: Careem launched years before Uber had meaningfully entered the region, and it built in features — most notably cash payments — that were essential in markets like Egypt and Pakistan where credit card penetration was low. That local-first approach let Careem expand to more than 70 cities across the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, and it eventually made Careem the first startup from the Middle East (outside Israel) to reach unicorn status.

By 2019, Careem had become enough of a regional threat that Uber decided the cheapest way to win the Gulf was to simply buy its rival. On 26 March 2019, Uber agreed to acquire Careem for $3.1 billion — $1.4 billion in cash and $1.7 billion in convertible notes — in what was, at the time, one of the largest tech acquisitions ever completed in the Middle East. The deal closed in January 2020, and Careem became a wholly owned Uber subsidiary.

The 2023 Split: Rides vs. "Super App"

What happened next is the part most casual observers missed. In April 2023, Careem was broken into two separate legal entities. Uber kept full ownership of the ride-hailing business, now run simply as "Careem Rides." Everything else — food and grocery delivery, digital payments, bike and scooter rentals, the DineOut restaurant platform, and the Careem Plus subscription bundle — was spun into a new company called Careem Technologies, built explicitly as a "super app" in the mould of Southeast Asia's Grab or China's Meituan.

Crucially, Uber didn't keep that business either. e& (the UAE telecom group formerly known as Etisalat) put in $400 million for a 50.03% majority stake in Careem Technologies, with Uber retaining roughly 42% and Careem's co-founders holding the remainder. The logic was straightforward: e& wanted a foothold in consumer fintech and super-app services, and Careem wanted a deep-pocketed local partner to fund a cash-burning expansion into delivery and payments — categories Uber itself was less interested in subsidizing outside its core markets.

Uber Buys Back In

That arrangement didn't last long. In June 2026, Uber agreed to buy a further 12.5% stake in Careem Technologies directly from e& for $100 million, cutting e&'s holding from 50.03% down to roughly 37.5% and pushing Uber's stake up to about 62.5% — majority control of the super app it had spun away just three years earlier.

Buried in the agreement is the more telling detail: both companies received options tied to e&'s remaining stake, exercisable in the window between December 2031 and January 2032. e& gets a put option to force Uber to buy out the rest of its position; Uber gets a matching call option to force the same sale from its side. Either way the mechanism points in one direction — a pre-agreed off-ramp for e& and a path back to full Uber ownership of Careem Technologies by the early 2030s.

The Numbers Behind the Deal

The financial backdrop helps explain why e& was willing to sell down its stake. When Careem Technologies published its first set of standalone financial results this year, they showed revenue of roughly AED 884 million (about $241 million) for the first half of 2026 — up a healthy 20% year-on-year — alongside an operating loss of about AED 447 million (around $122 million), which widened by roughly 28% compared with the same period last year. That works out to an average operating loss of close to $20 million a month for a business still scaling across delivery, payments and mobility services in parallel.

Perhaps the clearest signal of where things are headed: e& now classifies Careem Technologies as a "discontinued operation" in its own financial reporting — standard accounting language for a business a parent company plans to exit, rather than one it intends to keep growing indefinitely.

Why This Matters Beyond the Cap Table

Careem's ownership saga is a useful lens on a broader pattern in Gulf tech: homegrown startups that scale fast often end up as minority-owned appendages of the global platforms they once competed with, with local telecoms and sovereign-linked investors cycling in and out as strategic partners rather than permanent owners. For UAE consumers, the app on their phone probably won't look any different in the near term — rides, food delivery and payments will keep working as before. But as a case study in how a regional champion gets absorbed, spun out, partially re-nationalized and then slowly reabsorbed again, Careem's decade-long journey from Dubai garage story to Uber subsidiary — twice over — is hard to beat.