Careem did the work of teaching the MENA region that ride-hailing apps could be local, Arabic, and trustworthy. Then they sold to Uber. The market that Careem built is still here, but the local operator opportunity is, if anything, bigger than it was in 2019 — and most of it is being chased by founders with the wrong tools.
The wrong tool is usually an Indian clone script that says it speaks Arabic and discovers on contact with reality that the receipt PDF is left-to-right, the SMS body is mojibake, and the Fawry integration is "on the roadmap". The right tool is a platform that started in the region and only goes outward from there.
Waslni runs Palestine and Egypt today. The same codebase. Different brands, different currencies, different gateway stacks, different driver-document checklists, different languages on the receipts. Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, and Kuwait are configuration on the same platform — not a quarter of engineering each. That is what "Careem-like" looks like when the platform was actually built for the region.