Oguz Alper Oktem, CEO of Marti Technologies, Inc., was recently a guest on Benzinga's All-Access. Marti is Türkiye's mobility super app, offering multiple transportation services to its riders. Marti operates a ride-hailing service that matches riders with car and motorcycle drivers and operates a large fleet of rental e-mopeds, e-bikes and e-scooters. All of Marti's offerings are serviced by proprietary software systems and IoT infrastructure. The company has begun to monetize its hide-hailing service, putting the company on the path to capturing Türkiye's $7 billion ride-hailing opportunity.
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00:00And it is my pleasure to welcome in CEO of Arte Technologies, Alper Ogtem.
00:09It's wonderful to be with you today, Alper.
00:12Wonderful to see you again, Dan.
00:13How are you?
00:14Yeah, we're doing this all the time now, my man.
00:16The dream is alive.
00:17Listen, I wanted to start off and talk to you about why Turkey is such a, the country
00:22obviously Turkey, not the meat, is such a great market for a ride hailing platform to
00:27succeed in.
00:28And what did the market look like before Marty was there?
00:33Turkey is a G20 economy with 85 million people.
00:39It is huge.
00:41Istanbul, the largest city, is the largest city in Europe with around 20 million people.
00:48That's a huge city.
00:49And unfortunately, unlike the rest of the world, ride hailing didn't arrive here until
00:56late 2020s, sorry, early 2020s, a few years back when we started here.
01:04Right now, what we're doing is trying to catch Turkey up to the rest of the world in terms
01:07of ride hailing and other urban mobility services that are tech enabled.
01:12So think of countries the size of Mexico or much larger than, you know, other large European
01:21countries like Poland or, you know, Italy.
01:24Turkey is a prime market to transport people within an urban setting with a mobility super
01:31app.
01:32And Marty is exactly that company.
01:34We're the local champion.
01:35We're the dominant player.
01:38And we started out with e-scooters, e-mopeds and e-bikes and then extended our platform
01:44to ride hailing.
01:46And currently we are the number one mobility app in both iOS and Android stores.
01:51And we're quite proud with what we've achieved so far.
01:53Yeah, such a huge market, like you mentioned, you got to love being that local champion,
01:57such a big thing.
01:58And you know, I want to talk about driver recruitment.
02:01What does that look like?
02:02How difficult has it been to grow your fleet and retain those drivers?
02:05And what are the keys to success been there?
02:09So we started the company seven years ago, but we launched ride hailing around two and
02:15a half, three years maybe.
02:17And we've been very successful since it's launched.
02:21Currently we have 260,000 ride hailing drivers.
02:26That is 600,000 households.
02:28That is 600,000 cars or motorcycles on the streets because we do both motorcycle and
02:34car hailing at the same time.
02:36When we started the platform, we didn't monetize it.
02:39We focus on growth as much as we can.
02:43That's why we didn't charge a commission or put a take rate on any of our trips or drivers.
02:51That's why the financial impact of our ride hailing branch had not been reflected in our
02:59financial performance over the past years.
03:00Last year, we finished with $16.6 million of revenue from our micromobility operations,
03:06which is only a fraction of what we do.
03:08We are first and foremost a ride hailing company, and we recently just started monetizing it.
03:15And we're looking at more than doubling our revenues in 2025, up to $35 million a year.
03:22We are currently, again, at 260,000, 265,000 ride hailing drivers.
03:27But by the end of Q1, probably in March or April, we're going to hit 290,000.
03:32So it is growing very fast, and it is spreading like wildfire.
03:36Right now, we operate in four cities.
03:39That's the four largest cities in Turkey.
03:41That's Istanbul, Ankara, Antalya, and Izmir.
03:45But we're thinking about expanding to many more.
03:49And there are a lot more cities in Turkey that have the potential to be very large ride hailing markets.
03:57Istanbul, as I mentioned, is 15 to 20 million people, depending on how you measure it.
04:03But there are over 10 cities in Turkey with a population of over a million people.
04:07So the future is bright.
04:09We're nonstop recruiting drivers, and we have over 15 million downloads, I believe, currently.
04:15We've been the number one player.
04:17We've been the number one app on the App Store or the Android Play Store for over five, six years now.
04:25That's amazing.
04:26Like you mentioned, the local champion.
04:27You got to love that.
04:28You know, what is the TAM for ride hailing in Turkey?
04:31How much do you reasonably believe that Marty can capture of that?
04:35I mean, it's a great question.
04:37And the answer is quite simple to calculate, really.
04:41We look at New York, because TLC keeps amazing numbers.
04:44And we try to benchmark it through TLC's numbers.
04:47So right now, as we speak, there are 750,000 taxi trips daily just in the city of Istanbul.
04:57The rest of Turkey included, that's 1.5 million ride hailing trips in the entire,
05:02sorry, 1.5 million taxi trips in the entirety of the country daily.
05:08So if you look at TLC and what happened in New York, once ride hailing arrives,
05:11the taxi market doubles.
05:14So when everything is said and done and the market's saturated,
05:16there's going to be 3 million ride hailing trips in Turkey in total.
05:22At around $6 to $7 a trip, that is $7 billion of ride hailing gross merchandise value.
05:32That's $7 billion of GMV.
05:34And the take rates in the market currently are around 25% to 30%.
05:38That's what Uber or Lyft charges in the US.
05:40That's what a lot of global players charge around the world.
05:43So when you multiply those two numbers, we're looking at a market
05:46and, or however you want to call it, a GMV of $7 billion
05:50yearly and a revenue for ride hailing of $2 billion yearly.
05:55That's insane figures.
05:58And the future is super bright.
05:59Right now, we are charging a small commission on our trips,
06:05mainly a subscription fees for the drivers.
06:08But that's a fraction of what we can.
06:10If you were to grow to the level that we want to grow,
06:13saturate the market, and charge the global average take rates,
06:19we should be looking at billions of dollars of revenue.
06:21And we're super excited about it.
06:23Yeah, just massive, massive numbers.
06:24And I know you alluded to this a little while ago.
06:26You transitioned recently in your monetization strategy.
06:29How is that going right now?
06:32Oh, it's been much more smoother than we thought.
06:37Because again, 265,000 drivers is a fairly large number of people.
06:43Just changing the monetary structure of how you incentivize
06:48or disincentivize or work with those people as gig workers
06:51is a huge transition.
06:52So over the past few months, we went from a zero commission world
06:56to a world where we monetize our drivers.
06:59And it took a while.
07:02But right now, our projections instantly
07:08became free cash flow positive for the year of 2025.
07:12Again, we did $16.6 million of only micro mobility
07:15or two-wheeled electric vehicle rental revenues in 2024.
07:20And with the addition of the small subscription
07:23fee for our drivers at a much lower than market take rates,
07:27we are going to be hitting $35 million revenue in 2025.
07:31And that makes us free cash flow positive, hopefully.
07:34That is a huge accomplishment for a company of seven years,
07:38especially in a market as challenging as this.
07:41But the fact that we came to scale
07:45without charging anybody anything,
07:47hence we had prioritized growth so far,
07:51has made it so much easier for us
07:52today to go to our drivers and say, hey, guys,
07:56we supported you for two years.
07:57We did everything we can.
07:59We built this market.
08:00Now it's time to chip in.
08:01And people are super happy about it as well.
08:03Yeah, no, it seems like you guys are in a great place
08:05right now that you want to be in.
08:07And we got a question from the chat asking,
08:09do you have any plans to expand outside of Turkey?
08:13Right now, the market in Turkey is playing catch up.
08:18So despite being the 17th,
08:27I think we're at a little delay there.
08:30We appreciate that question from the chat.
08:32We'll try to get Alper back in just a moment.
08:36Obviously, there's a lot of saturation.
08:39It's a huge, sorry.
08:39Sorry, Dan.
08:40It's a huge opportunity.
08:42That's why our main focus right now
08:44for the next one, two years
08:46is to reach that $7 billion GME for the entire market
08:50and dominate the space
08:52with as much market share as possible.
08:56Because as you know,
08:56the first mover advantage is huge in these markets.
08:59That's why Uber dominates in the US.
09:02And the second player to enter Lyft
09:03is at a certain market share
09:05that is not akin to that of Uber.
09:07That's why right now our focus is on Turkey.
09:09However, that being said,
09:11we are currently monitoring for talented teams
09:15around the world that we could acquire and work with.
09:19We're looking for teams that would fit our culture
09:21and our way of doing business
09:23and maybe acquire them to be able to enter other markets.
09:26Furthermore, Turkey on its own is a huge market
09:30and we could offer other services.
09:33So right now, for example,
09:34we don't monetize it,
09:35we don't make money from it,
09:36but we have a wallet within our Marti app,
09:39again, with 15 million downloads.
09:41It's a huge opportunity.
09:43We have peer-to-peer money transfer allowed in that wallet.
09:46If we decide to go for it and build a FinTech out of it,
09:49that's a huge opportunity too.
09:51So there are avenues both outside and inside of Turkey,
09:53even after we hit this huge market sectorization goal
09:57for ride hailing in the country.
09:59Yep.
10:00Now it seems like the possibilities are endless,
10:01which is obviously a very exciting thing.
10:03And I wanted to ask you about AI.
10:04We know obviously how big of a deal it is
10:05in so many things right now.
10:07Is AI changing how you operate at all?
10:10And how do you use it
10:11or plan to use it in the future?
10:16The way we look at AI is obviously the world is changing.
10:20It's changing rapidly
10:22and companies that do not morph themselves
10:26into AI-friendly entities are going to be left behind.
10:29So we're very careful and cautious about it.
10:31And we look at it in two ways.
10:32One, how is this going to change our operations
10:35of two-wheeled electric rentals, micro mobility, right?
10:39We already have acquired the assets
10:41of a Boston-based AI-focused
10:45micro mobility optimization company named ZOBA.
10:50So we do our vehicle collecting, charging, deployment,
10:55rebalancing of e-bombheads, e-scooters, and e-bikes,
10:58our micro mobility fleet, based on that AI tool.
11:01And we have a team working very diligently
11:02on how that could make our business better.
11:04And we see tremendous efficiencies
11:07from using those tools that are,
11:10that have basically become possible
11:11with the emergence of AI.
11:13So that's the micro mobility part.
11:15And we are already, I'd say, ahead of the curve there.
11:18On the ride-hailing side,
11:20I think that's the more exciting bit.
11:22Obviously, companies like Waymo or Uber's robo-taxis
11:26are coming into the market.
11:28Our view currently is that that market for ride-hailing
11:32is going to resemble that of micro mobility
11:34in the sense that there are going to be
11:36manufacturers of vehicles, manufacturers of technology
11:41up in the value chain.
11:43And then below that are going to be operators like us
11:45who acquire those fleets and who operate those vehicles.
11:49I believe within five to 10 years,
11:51there are going to be more companies like Waymo or Uber
11:54that offer those software and hardware readily available.
11:59They're going to make the software and hardware
12:00readily available for operators like us.
12:03And operators like us,
12:04any ride-hailing operation around the world
12:07are going to raise money
12:08and are going to acquire those fleets.
12:10And it's going to be about maintaining those cars,
12:13deploying those cars and operating those cars.
12:16And we have a seven year experience in operating hardware.
12:22So we look at the age of AI for ride-hailing
12:25to be super bright for us, we're ready for it.
12:28And our view is that there are going to be multiple players
12:30in the market that are willing to be,
12:32that will develop the technology
12:34to sell to operators like us.
12:37And then we're going to buy those cars through financing.
12:40We're going to finance those cars
12:41and then deploy them in markets
12:42like large cities of Istanbul.
12:46And we are preparing for that.
12:47We're building teams, we're building strategies
12:49and we're going to be ahead of the curve there as well.
12:51I love it.
12:52Very exciting times for Mardi Technologies.
12:54And listen, it was an absolute pleasure
12:55talking to you today, Alper.
12:56Thank you so much for your time
12:57and all the best going forward.
13:00I appreciate it, Dan, thank you.