Salman Utmanzai

Salman Utmanzai is the founder of Sawarri, Pakistan's carpooling and ride-sharing network. He built it to give something that was already happening — people arranging shared rides with strangers in WhatsApp groups — a place where it could actually be searched, checked and relied on.

Why Sawarri exists

Carpooling in Pakistan did not start with a website. It started in WhatsApp groups: someone would post "leaving Islamabad for Abbottabad at 7, two seats", a few people would reply, and the trip would fill. It worked, and it still does — but messages scroll away within minutes, there is no way to search for a route, no way to know anything about the person whose car you are getting into, and no record of any of it afterwards.

Sawarri is that same habit with the missing parts added. The rides are still posted by ordinary drivers going about their day. What changed is that they are searchable by route and date, they stay visible until the seats are gone, every person has an account rather than an anonymous number, and there are safety tools around the whole thing. The platform grew out of the Islamabad–Hazara commute, which is still its busiest corridor.

The principles it is built on

• Drivers set their own fare. Sawarri does not price a seat, does not collect the money and takes no commission. The number on the ride is what the passenger hands the driver.
• A booking is a request, not an instant charge. The driver approves it, so neither side ends up committed to a stranger they have not agreed to travel with.
• Verification before the badge. CNIC, driving licence, vehicle and number plate are checked before a driver's rides carry the verified mark — and a driver who has not been checked is labelled plainly rather than hidden.
• Women-only rides are part of the same board. The driver marks a ride women-only when publishing it, and the restriction travels with the ride instead of being negotiated afterwards.
• It is a marketplace, not a transport company. Sawarri does not employ drivers and does not own vehicles, and the site says so plainly.

How Sawarri gets built

Sawarri is its own project. It is not someone else's product, not a client build and not a demo — it has its own drivers, its own passengers, its own bookings and its own business to run.

Salman is also a Forward Deployed Engineer at WPOS.AI, the AI operating layer for WordPress, and Sawarri is built and run with it. Working that way on a live product is a harder test than any sample site: the ride board, the city and route pages, the driver verification flow, the dashboards and the WhatsApp rides that arrive daily all have to keep working for people who are actually trying to get somewhere.

Writing on Sawarri

He writes the guides published on Sawarri — route breakdowns, the pickup points drivers actually use, how to split fuel costs fairly, and what to check before travelling with someone you have not met. They are collected on the carpool guides page. The product itself is described on About Sawarri and How it works.

Get in touch

The fastest route is the Sawarri support line on WhatsApp, or the contact page. Sawarri is also on Instagram.