A commuter in Colombo opens the same app four times across the day. First to book a ride to work, dodging the morning traffic. Then again at noon, when a co-worker asks if anyone wants food ordered in. By evening, it’s a ride home and an order for the rice and coconut oil they forgot to buy over the weekend. Different errands, different times of day, same app the whole way through. Behind each of those taps is someone else’s income. A driver picking up the morning fare. A home cook packing the lunch order between chores. A small grocery store logging a delivery it never used to get. The same four errands that make up one person’s day are, for someone else, a living.
That app is PickMe, and this kind of day repeats itself for 1.9 million people every month across Sri Lanka. What started as a way to book a three-wheeler has grown into an expansive platform offering: ride-hailing, food and grocery delivery, trucking, long-distance rentals, parcel logistics, and now, ticketing for concerts and events. More than 165,000 driver earners and 5,000 merchant earners earn a living through it. The company spent last year turning that reach into results: a market capitalisation that grew 87.8%, in a market it describes as crowded with local and foreign competitors, chasing the same users over the same twelve years. Most of them didn’t last. PickMe did.
Jiffry Zulfer, Founder and CEO at PickMe, puts the reason simply. “We take a lot of passion in making sure we solve local problems using technology and putting our users at the center,” he says. “That’s really been the reason for our success.” Eleven years after starting with what he still calls “the magic of just connecting a vehicle,” that instinct now drives seven core businesses, employs 485 people, and is heading into its next phase of growth on the very same principles.
Beyond the Ride: Building a Platform for Daily Life
“We are a digital native business. We are born in the digital ecosystem. We have no buildings, we have no vehicles, no cloud kitchens or dark stores, nothing,” Zulfer says, describing PickMe as it was at the very beginning, and as it remains today. Eleven years ago, the platform was a way to book a three-wheeler without standing in the street and waving one down. Today, with the same app, you can order groceries, book a truck to move furniture, rent a car for a weekend in Ella, ship a parcel across the island, or buy a concert ticket. Some 1.9 million people open it every month. More than 165,000 driver earners and 5,000 merchant earners generate income through the platform, which distributed over Rs73 billion directly to these independent earners in the year to March 2026.
That range was not the plan from day one. Zulfer describes the starting point as narrower: solving the “reliability and safety issues in the passenger transport sector using technology” that Colombo commuters lived with in 2015. PickMe began there, as a ride-hailing app, then built out the rest of that range one service at a time over the following decade, Food, Market, Flash, Courier, Rentals, with ticketing through Explore the newest addition, in 2025. It was only once the ride-hailing app had reached scale, Zulfer says, that a larger opportunity became clear.
“We moved beyond facilitating passenger transport to build a unified digital marketplace that connects consumers, independent drivers, independent merchants, and enterprises on one platform,” he says.
L-R: Lydia Mascarenhas, Chief Human Resources Officer at PickMe Tasnim Salie, Chief Corporate Officer at PickMe
The expansion followed a deliberate logic. “We unlocked this scale first by lowering the barriers to entry across the board,” Zulfer says, describing self-serve digital onboarding that allowed anyone, from a full-time driver to a home-based cook, to start earning without heavy upfront costs. PickMe backed that access with infrastructure: proprietary geospatial intelligence and dispatch algorithms, an expansion beyond Colombo into the districts, and trilingual language support built in from the start rather than added later.
The next step was getting the same consumer to use more than one service. “By encouraging users who joined for ride-hailing to also use Food Delivery, Flash, or Trucks, we boosted platform stickiness and gave independent driver earners on the platform multiple ways to generate income,” Zulfer says. Independent driver earnings on the platform grew more than 14% in the last financial year, the figure he points to as proof the approach works. “An ecosystem this size only thrives when its participants do,” he says.
Gayath Ratnayake, Chief Technology Officer at PickMe
That range now has to serve different people with different priorities, and Zulfer draws sharp lines between them. “Everyday commuters using ride-hailing are price-sensitive in the current economic environment, placing their primary focus on safety, reliability and transparent pricing,” he says. Food and Market consumers want something else: convenience, value and reach, while the merchant earners want to reach new customers without paying for a shopfront or running their own delivery fleet.
Businesses moving cargo through PickMe Trucks need capacity on demand. It’s a completely different problem from the tourists and corporate clients renting vehicles through PickMe Rentals, who value flexibility and a trusted driver over speed. Flash and Courier consumers, from someone sending a single parcel to a small business managing daily deliveries, care about transparent pricing and reliable reach islandwide.
L-R Fazly Pasha, Chief Information Security Officer at PickMe Maduranga Kulathilaka, Chief Financial Officer at PickMe
“We love to cannibalise our business,” Zulfer says, referring to PickMe’s willingness to launch a new service that competes for the same consumer’s attention. “Someone in Jaffna should be able to courier something to Galle at any time,” he adds, pointing to the seamless, everyday reach he wants the network to achieve.
L-R: Yasas Kasthuriarachchi, Chief Rides Operations Officer at PickMe Nuzrath Nazar, Chief Food and Market Operations Officer at PickMe Mohan Gamage, Chief Marketing Officer at PickMe
In September 2025, PickMe expanded further into lifestyle services with the launch of Events (later relaunched as “Explore”): a QR-ticketing platform covering concerts, pet shows, tuition classes, and more. “This idea came from our engineers themselves,” Zulfer says, describing how the vertical began. “Our users’ daily lives don’t stop at getting from point A to point B or having a meal delivered. Having already built trust, secure payment infrastructure, and deep consumer relationships, we were positioned to make this transition.” While still in the early days with plenty of activities left to onboard, Zulfer has a clear vision for where the vertical is headed: using the platform to surface events and venues in towns that sit outside Colombo’s traditional cultural map.
Continuous Investment in Technology Keeps PickMe Ahead of Its Rivals
“Anyone can come, anyone can go,” Zulfer says, describing the local ride-hailing market. “We’ve had 50+ competitors, so it is a crowded market.” Local players have chased the same users, and international operators with far deeper pockets have circled the same opportunity. Eleven years on, PickMe is the brand that has outlasted most of them and gone public on the Colombo Stock Exchange. Zulfer points to one reason above all: PickMe’s annual technology spend and investment in proprietary platform development exceeds Rs1.6 billion in FY2026, without pause. “Our investment in technology is fairly large. In fact, one of the largest in the country,” he says. “If you just compare that to a brick-and-mortar kind of business, every year, we will be putting in a 100-bed hotel.”
That Rs1.6 billion a year buys something specific. PickMe’s original promise, in Zulfer’s words, was simply the magic of connecting a rider to a vehicle. “The starting point was always the friction felt by our consumers and driver-earners, particularly the uncertainty over arrival times and imprecise pickups in dense or unfamiliar locations,” he says. AI-driven pickup point automation and sharper fare estimates through Google Maps integration were built to solve exactly that. The Driver App tackled the same friction from the other side. “It was rebuilt on our latest technology framework using feedback from driver earners,” Zulfer says, with PIN verification to ensure the right rider was getting into the right vehicle. The result: wait times down 16%, connection times down 25%.
Behind those numbers sits a structural change most riders never see. “A major infrastructure re-architecture moved us to a highly scalable multi-tenant platform, now capable of supporting transaction volumes up to ten times current levels,” Zulfer says. Completed in October 2025, the upgrade serves more than just ride-hailing: a Trucks booking, a Food order, and a Flash delivery all move through the same rebuilt system. That headroom lets engineers rebuild the matching algorithms, dispatch systems, and geospatial intelligence behind the cuts in wait and connection times. The same technology budget also runs an AI system that Zulfer says “makes about a million decisions every day,” across the platform, from matching a driver to a rider to flagging a fraudulent transaction.
Sustaining that Rs1.6 billion a year, Zulfer says, comes down to one number. “Our capital-light, asset-light model delivered a Return on Equity of 68.7% last year, giving us the ability to fund our technology investment from our own operating performance, rather than depending on external capital,” he says. The second part of his case is not financial. “PickMe was built by Sri Lankans, for Sri Lankans, understanding local nuances and problems since our founding in 2015,” he says.
“That gives us domain expertise and stakeholder relationships that are incredibly difficult for an outside entrant to replicate quickly.” That expertise shows up in two concrete places: a network of physical branches for face-to-face support over an app, and loyalty programmes like PickMe Pramuka, built for its driver earners on the platform.
Fifty-plus competitors have tested this market over eleven years. PickMe’s answer has been the same each time: invest in technology, funded by a business light enough on assets to keep paying for it out of its own profits. Zulfer argues that advantage compounds with breadth; a platform spanning seven verticals builds a depth of consumer engagement and earner loyalty that cannot easily be competed away with price cuts alone. “We’ve done a lot to stay ahead, and we will keep doing a lot. We will never rest,” he says of the competition still circling. “We understand the local market very well. We’re invested in it.”
Building Entrepreneurs by Removing What Stood in Their Way
The same Rs1.6 billion a year that defended PickMe against competitors also lowered the cost of entry for everyone building a business on top of it. For a home cook or a small shop owner, the biggest expense was never talent. It was a storefront, a delivery fleet, a way to find customers. “Our technology handles the logistical and operational complexity of doing business, making entrepreneurship highly accessible to individuals who otherwise wouldn’t have the capital or physical reach to compete,” Zulfer says. The numbers show it: monthly unique consumers on Food and Marketplace grew 42% last year, order volumes climbed 35%, and the merchant base grew 34%, the highest onboarding volume in PickMe’s history. PickMe Food itself expanded from 5 districts to 16, extending into towns like Badulla and Bandarawela for the first time.
Across drivers and merchants combined, PickMe now counts an earner network of more than 170,000 people building income through the platform. Getting there took people on the ground, not just an app: a dedicated Merchant Acquisition Executive programme, and merchant forums held in Colombo, Kandy, Nuwara Eliya, Galle, and Matara. Once onboarded, tools like the Promotion Management Tool and in-app advertising gave the smallest merchants “the kind of visibility they couldn’t easily secure on their own,” Zulfer says. The backend did the rest. “Digitally optimised logistics, order pooling, and dedicated merchant portals mean they can operate and scale without needing their own delivery riders, storefronts, or complex logistics setups,” he says.
None of this reads to Zulfer as a one-off push. “We are growing entrepreneurs every day,” he says. “This is the beauty of the ecosystem we are creating. We are allowing wealth creation to take place. We are allowing distribution of trade to happen, and we are a key enabler in that.” It’s a claim delivered with real conviction. “I don’t think any industry has created more entrepreneurs than us,” he says, “and that’s the real satisfaction when we really see small and medium companies doing really well on our platform.”
That satisfaction is easy to create when things are going well. The real test came when they didn’t. When Cyclone Ditwah hit in late 2025, PickMe extended targeted usage fee relief to its merchant community in Kandy. Months later, as the Middle East fuel crisis pushed prices up, it introduced additional payments for its driver earners. In both cases, the platform absorbed the shock rather than passing it on to the people earning through it.
The same vision now applies to Explore, PickMe’s newest vertical. “Just like we created cloud kitchens and dark kitchens, we’ll be able to create smaller events for people with different interests,” Zulfer says, “giving artists and people with special skills a way to reach a bigger audience, distribution was one of their biggest challenges.” The logic runs through every vertical PickMe has built. Ride-hailing drivers spend less time idling or roaming for a fare than they would waiting at a three-wheeler stand. Food gave a home cook a way to compete without capital. PickMe Explore offers a smaller organiser or performer a way to reach people who’d otherwise never hear about them.
Driving Towards an Electric Future
The same Middle East fuel crisis that pushed PickMe to add payments for its driver earners also strengthened the case for going electric. “With prices of fuel going up, we are seeing adoption of EVs also increasing,” Zulfer says. His argument for why a ride-hailing company should care about emissions at all starts somewhere more basic: a parked car. “Vehicle ownership is an unnecessary expense,” he says. “You will end up buying a vehicle that will cost you Rs10 million, and essentially most of these assets are not fully utilised. Ninety percent of the time it’s sitting in a garage or in a car park.” A car booked through PickMe is the same asset, put back to work instead of sitting idle.
PickMe owns no fleet, so its technology has one job: keeping drivers who are already on the road moving from one fare to the next, instead of idling between them. “Using intelligent routing, real-time demand matching, and advanced logistics pooling, we minimise idle travel, eliminate empty returns, and reduce urban congestion,” Zulfer says. The result, in his framing, is fewer empty trips and less pressure to own a car at all. “By substituting informal, fragmented transport patterns with a highly optimised digital network, we naturally lower the carbon footprint per trip, while offering a reliable alternative that actively encourages a reduction in private car ownership,” he says.
Not everyone can rely on someone else’s idling car. A full-time driver still needs their own vehicle, and PickMe’s belief is that it should be electric. “We are well positioned to accelerate EV adoption across Sri Lanka,” Zulfer says. “The EV transition is here to stay, and our digital platform acts as the ideal catalyst to resolve the range and utilisation challenges that independent driver earners often face.” The evidence isn’t hypothetical. Through a partnership with LOLC and Browns, PickMe opened an EV Experience Centre in January 2026, and by March, more than 125 electric vehicles had been handed over to drivers at a ceremony at the Galle Face Hotel under a rent-to-own model called “Drive to Own.”
The EV push comes with a formal commitment attached. PickMe has adopted SLFRS S1 and S2, sustainability disclosure standards it uses to report on climate-related risk. “Integrating environmental sustainability through algorithmic efficiency remains a core pillar of our long-term strategy rather than a secondary initiative,” Zulfer says. A dedicated sustainability function is still being built out, the standards exist to hold that process to a fixed baseline as it develops, rather than leaving progress undefined.
PickMe’s Next Move: Smarter Cars and Bigger Ambitions
PickMe’s priorities for the next five years, Zulfer says, extend the same principles that built the company: keep investing in technology, empowering earners, and making everyday economic activity more accessible. The company has forecast a shift like this before. “We never had two-wheelers in this country, and we were able to bring that in, and it has become one of the largest modes of transport today,” Zulfer says. The next shift, he says, is artificial intelligence, and further out, autonomous vehicles. “I think it’s something that we think we have to keep in line with, because the world is also moving towards that,” he says. The plan also includes expanding services beyond the Western Province, accelerating EV adoption, and strengthening earnings stability for drivers and merchants.
Success at home has drawn attention elsewhere too. “We’ve had many reach-outs coming in because of our success in our country,” Zulfer says. “Hopefully you will see us springing over at other markets as well.” For now, the focus stays put. “Our focus has been in Sri Lanka. We want to be able to serve the Sri Lanka market and make sure that we stay relevant to Sri Lanka,” he says. As the company pursues these ambitions, in his view, the PickMe brand will evolve to represent something beyond a mobility company alone. “We see it as a vital part of the digital infrastructure that will power Sri Lanka’s next phase of economic growth,” Zulfer says. The goal for the next five years is to make sure that infrastructure is “smarter, more resilient, and inclusive.”