Founder’s Story

A Journey and a Dream

Travel teaches you a great deal. And the forms of travel are countless, but the longest, most complex, and most beautiful journey of all is the one we call life. A person is born and at every step finds a new destination, a new challenge, a new turn. Sometimes this vehicle slows to a crawl, sometimes it races ahead, sometimes the road is clear and sometimes the fog is so thick that even the next step cannot be seen. But every journey has one ending, a conclusion.

I am not afraid of that ending. What I fear is that this journey ends without leaving a mark. I do not want to merely reach the finish line. I want to pass this journey forward. To live on. That same desire pushed me to write my travelogue, to preserve in words the roads I had travelled and the moments I had lived, so that some unknown wanderer might one day read those pages and feel that the journey never really ended. I want to become a link in a chain that reaches the generations yet to come, one they can stand on and move further ahead.

My love for travel began in childhood. I wandered across countless corners of Pakistan, from Khyber to Sindh, from the roads of Punjab to the edges of Balochistan where there is no trace of civilization, where there is only earth, sky, and a strange silence that settles into the soul. But the truth is, none of those geographical journeys were anywhere near as adventurous as the one that began in 2019.

2019 was the year I said goodbye to my city of love, Jhang, and set off for Lahore, for good. Jhang is the city that made me. My childhood is scattered across its streets. The scent of its soil still weighs on my heart in unexpected moments. But dreams demand space, and I made that space.

I came to Lahore, completed my A Levels, and then enrolled at COMSATS University. A new life began, but the thought that had lodged itself in my mind never left. That restlessness to leave something behind, that hunger to build something that lasts, it never quieted. Even in a city as large as Lahore, I could not find a single like-minded soul. This journey was a solitary one, but solitude gave me time to think, and thinking led me to a problem I could not ignore.

I was studying Software Engineering, and it was never just a degree to me. It was my obsession. I found in lines of code the same peace that a poet finds in verse. See the problem, think of the solution, build it. That was simply my nature. I was approaching the final stretch of my degree, four years of effort nearing their end, yet my mind grew more restless with each passing day. Would this journey end here? Get the degree, find a job, live a comfortable life? No. That ending was never meant for me.

And alongside us on the highway, private cars rolled by effortlessly, with empty seats. In that moment, a single question flashed through my mind. These empty seats and these overcrowded passengers, why can they not be connected?

That was the moment. No grand revelation, no stage-lit inspiration, just a tired traveller, an ordinary road, and a question that refused to let go.

Jhang to Lahore, Lahore to Islamabad, Multan to Lahore. I had lived these routes myself. Expensive fares, a complete absence of trust, no reliable option in sight. And on the other side, drivers already making these journeys alone, carrying the full weight of fuel costs.

I was on the edge of finishing my degree and that was precisely when something inside me said, now finish this too.

And so the journey of SafarLink began. Pakistan's first intercity ride-sharing platform. Not a dream, a necessity. Not just an idea, a mission. Because the journey I lived, millions of Pakistanis live every single day, exhausted, burdened by rising fares, searching for something they can trust. SafarLink was built for them.