Oguz Alper Oktem, CEO of Marti Technologies, Inc., was recently interviewed by Benzinga. Marti fashions itself as 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. Mr. Oktem shared his vision for Marti's future.
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00:00Hey Zingers, it's Dan Leach, and I have a wonderful guest for you today.
00:06It is the CEO of Marti Technologies, Alper Oktem.
00:10It's so great to be with you, Alper.
00:12Thanks, Dan. Nice to talk to you as well.
00:14Well, let's talk about Marti. Can you give us an overview and what led you to start it?
00:18And what has the journey been like for you to this point?
00:20Well, Marti is the only at-scale urban transportation solution that's tech-enabled in Turkey.
00:28We founded the company around seven years ago.
00:31And back when we started in 2018, there was no ride-hailing in Turkey.
00:37There was no motorcycle-hailing in Turkey.
00:39There was no e-bike-sharing, e-moped-sharing.
00:42There was no scooter-sharing.
00:44Nothing that was tech-enabled transportation available anywhere around the country.
00:49And then, you know, I was a twice-entrepreneur before.
00:53I'd done a couple of other projects.
00:55And, you know, I went to school in the U.S. at the University of Chicago.
00:58I used to travel a lot back then.
01:00And I saw around the world that there were a myriad of solutions for urban transportation that were based on tech.
01:09And Turkey lacked all of them.
01:11And I saw multiple examples for transportation super apps.
01:15And I thought, why not? Why not build one in Turkey?
01:19Because Turkey is a pretty large, sizable country with 85, 90 million people in terms of population.
01:27Istanbul, which is the largest city in the country, is the largest in Europe with around 15 million people living in it.
01:34And there are more than 10 cities in Turkey with a population of over 1 million.
01:38So it is a fairly large market.
01:40And we thought, why not start it and scale it little by little?
01:47We began in 2018.
01:49In a pretty short amount of time, we became the number one mobility app on both Android and iOS app stores.
01:57We've been growing ever since.
01:59Well, let's talk about that growth.
02:01You know, how many riders do you have now?
02:02What parts of Turkey are you in?
02:04And, you know, when you look at where you hope to go and be in another three years, where is that?
02:09Well, we sort of began in, again, 2018.
02:16But we began with micromobility only.
02:19And our goal was to build a large enough platform so that we could launch ride hailing when we were of size.
02:27So we started doing Uber-style ride hailing in October of 2022.
02:32We were already the number one mobility app in Turkey at that point.
02:37We had around 4 to 5 million users in 2022.
02:43And since then, based on our significant growth, we were able to build a driver base of around 260,000 drivers today, which is very significant.
02:57And we hope to finish the first quarter, you know, we hope to reach in March to around 290,000 drivers.
03:04That's around 10 times more than the number of taxis in the city of Istanbul, which is, again, the largest in Europe.
03:11So we are at a pretty significant size in terms of ride hailing.
03:17When you think about the scale and the size of the market, we are already in four or five cities.
03:25And those four or five cities have helped us become the unquestionable number one in transportation solutions in the country.
03:37When we benchmark ourselves against the taxi market in Istanbul, there's around 750,000 taxi trips in the city.
03:46And when ride hailing arrives, that number tends to double.
03:51So there's 750,000 taxi trips in Istanbul.
03:54There's another 750,000 taxi trips in Turkey in general.
03:58This is per day.
03:59And ride hailing doubles it.
04:01That equals, you know, when everything's said and done, of a market size of daily 3 million trips in our country.
04:09And that's, you know, if you look at it in terms of dollars, a trip, a ride hailing trip in Turkey is around $7 now.
04:19So that's a total of, I want to say, $67 billion, $6 to $7 billion of gross merchandise value.
04:27Ride hailing take rates globally are around 28, 29, maybe 30%.
04:33So if you apply those numbers, that's $2 billion of potential revenue.
04:38That's our goal.
04:39That's where we want to get to.
04:41And we are going there pretty steadily, but pretty strongly as well.
04:46The future definitely, definitely looks bright.
04:48You're going to be fired up.
04:49I wanted to ask you, what is the competition like from Uber and Lyft?
04:53And how does the market, you know, differentiate itself from them?
04:56Look, globally speaking, there's more than Uber and Lyft, right?
05:04Every sort of G20 economy has a very large ride hailing operator that has significant market share.
05:14So in Northern America, that's Uber.
05:17In Europe, there's Uber Bolt.
05:20There's Cabify in Spain, right?
05:22There's Freenow in Germany.
05:25In the Gulf, there's Korean.
05:26In India, there's Ola.
05:28In China, there's Didi.
05:29In Indonesia, there's Gojek.
05:31In, again, that part of the world, Southeast Asia, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines.
05:36Indonesia, there's Grab.
05:38There's Kakao in Korea.
05:41There's all these companies.
05:43There's Yandex in Russia, for example.
05:45There's all these companies in G20 economies that serve ride hailing at a very large scale.
05:53That is the go-to solution for urban mobility.
05:57That's what we plan to do.
05:58Turkey is a G20 economy.
06:00We're the 17th largest economy in the world with 85 million people.
06:04And the market itself is large enough to support a fairly large mobility super app.
06:11That's our goal.
06:12That's what we want to be.
06:14And in terms of competition, we tend to believe that the local player, the local champion in markets like Turkey always wins.
06:21We look at Indonesia.
06:22We look at India.
06:24We look at the Gulf.
06:25We look at all these places around the world that have a local champion who understands the field,
06:32who understands the country, who understands the people, and can serve said people in the best way possible.
06:40Global players come in.
06:41Global players go.
06:43That's played out in multiple countries outside of Turkey.
06:47And that's what we believe is going to play out in Turkey.
06:50The local champion is always more advantageous.
06:53Absolutely.
06:54Listen, you alluded to this a little earlier.
06:56Obviously, being the local champion is the key.
06:58But when you look at plans to possibly bring market to other markets, expanding the services beyond ride-hailing,
07:04what is the possibility?
07:06Obviously, I know you want to focus on everything and dominate Turkey first.
07:09But what does that kind of look like in the possibilities going forward as well?
07:13Our main goal, our sole focus, and we're like laser-focused right now,
07:18is to catch Turkey up to the rest of the world when it comes to tech-enabled transportation.
07:23If you come to Istanbul, A, you're going to love it.
07:26It's beautiful.
07:27But B, you're going to realize getting around the city is super hard.
07:31Transportation infrastructure, unfortunately, is behind its peers.
07:35But taxis completely suck.
07:38There is not enough taxis in the city of Istanbul to serve the city.
07:43The quality is abysmal.
07:46And there's a lot of scamming, a lot of poor client management.
07:55There's a lot of stuff out there, right?
07:58Borderline fraud going on if you want to take a cab in the city of Istanbul.
08:01It's very hard.
08:02We're here to fix that.
08:04And once we do, we're looking at a market of $7 billion of GMB.
08:09Right now, we are super focused on our local country and to expand our services.
08:16We're only in like four or five cities right now.
08:19And there are 81 in Turkey.
08:21So right now the goal is to build a large mobility super app in Turkey akin to the names I mentioned.
08:29After that, I don't know.
08:31The future, I'm sure it's bright.
08:34Even past us dominating the ride-hailing space.
08:38After that, we acquire new players in other geographies.
08:40Are we going to other verticals in Turkey?
08:42Again, as I've said, maybe Fintech.
08:44Who knows?
08:45But that's down the line.
08:46Right now, we have to build the most dominant, the best, the highest quality ride-hailing service Turkey can offer.
08:57We want people in the city of Istanbul to press a button on their phone, click an app on their phone,
09:04and get a car within minutes that's economic, that's environmentally friendly, and it's just convenient.
09:13That's what we're after.
09:14And we're getting there.
09:16That's perfectly said.
09:17And I was wondering, you know, as far as obviously AI is huge these days,
09:20are you incorporating AI into the service?
09:22Are there plans for that going forward?
09:25Sure.
09:26I mean, like everybody else, we're trying to make sure that you're not behind in the AI game.
09:33We have a team that's working on it that's trying to understand it.
09:36But obviously what's next for our business line is autonomous vehicles, robo-taxis as they call them,
09:45AVs that drive people from point A to point B and act as taxis.
09:50That's what's coming to our industry.
09:53On the micromobility side, scooters, e-bikes, e-mopeds,
09:57we have AI-based tools that tell us where the demand is, where we should deploy our vehicles,
10:04when they should be rebalanced to other places, when they should be collected,
10:09what routes should be taken when those vehicles are collected from the streets,
10:13when should they be charged, when should they be plugged in,
10:17when should they be left to wait on the streets for the next user.
10:22We have a pretty comprehensive AI tool on the micromobility side.
10:26But on the ride-hailing side, it is all about the AV game.
10:29And we're very closely watching what's happening in that space.
10:35And we have a pretty educated stance, I'd say, as to what's going to unfold in that market
10:44within the next five to ten years.
10:46Definitely exciting times. The bright future is here in many ways.
10:49Alper Oktob, the CEO of Marty Technologies, that was an absolutely fascinating conversation.
10:54Thank you so much for joining me today. And nothing but the best going forward.
10:57Thank you very much, Dan. Have a good day.