Every major tech company produces a diaspora. Uber's alumni seeded half of Silicon Valley's mobility and logistics stack. Grab's early team fanned out across Southeast Asia. PayPal's, well, we all know about PayPal's.

Careem's $3.1 billion acquisition by Uber in 2019 was the MENA equivalent, less a corporate transaction than a particle collision event, the Large Hadron Collider moment that sent a generation of operators, engineers, product leads, and city launchers scattering across the region and beyond.

The company, renowned for breeding a very specific type of founder, minted a generation of millionaires thanks to its ESOP programme (reportedly roughly 75 dollar millionaires and over 200 dirham millionaires) and armed them with playbooks for scaling in some of the world's most complex and fragmented markets.

What happened next is well documented. The names show up constantly, in fundraising announcements, across LinkedIn timelines and so on.

What does not exist, however, is a single, structured, easily accessible directory that lets you see, at a glance, who these founders are, when they left, what they are building, how much they have raised, and where they came from inside Careem.

So, we’ve built one.

FWDstart’s Careem Mafia Database tracks 44 founders who cut their teeth at the region's most consequential startup and went on to launch their own ventures. We’ve mapped out where they worked within Careem, what roles they held, when they left, and what they are building today, across 13 countries and 16 sectors, with over an estimated $1.6 billion in combined capital raised.

A few things worth noting upfront. This is not intended to be the definitive, all-encompassing census of every person who ever swiped a badge at Careem HQ. We have prioritised founders who are actively building startups today, which means the list skews towards operators who went on to found or co-found companies that are live and raising.

We haven’t yet included the cohort of ex-Careemers who moved into investing and VC, though that is coming in a V2. Best to consider this a living document, one we’ll update regularly as new names surface and new ventures launch.

The Careem Mafia Database is available exclusively to FWDstart premium subscribers. Look, we could dress this up, but the pitch is simple: we spend an unreasonable amount of time building tools like this so you don't have to piece it together yourself.

Trackers, databases, deep dives, the stuff that actually helps you do your job better, whether that is sourcing deals, sizing up the competition, or just staying dangerously well-informed. If you are not yet a premium subscriber, you know what to do.

Now, let’s dig in.

You’ll also get access to our MENA Diaspora 50, MENA IPO Tracker, MENA Founder Playbook, MENA VC Playbook, as well as 60+ deep-dives.