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Marti Technologies $MRT: Transforming Turkey’s Urban Mobility
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Mar 27, 2025
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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Hey Zingers, it's Dan Leach and I have a wonderful guest for you today
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It is the CEO of Marty Technologies, Alper Akhtem. It's so great to be with you, Alper
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Thanks, Dan. Nice to talk to you as well. Well, let's talk about Marty
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Can you give us an overview and what led you to start it? And what has the journey been like for you to this point
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Well, Marty is the only at scale urban transportation solution that's tech enabled in Turkey
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We founded the company around seven years ago. And back when we started in 2018, there was no ride hailing in Turkey
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There was no motorcycle hailing in Turkey. There was no e-bike sharing, e-moped sharing
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There was no scooter sharing. Nothing that was tech-enabled transportation available anywhere around the country
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And then, you know, I was a twice entrepreneur before. I'd done a couple of other projects
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and you know I went to school in the U.S. at the University of Chicago. I used to travel a lot back
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then and I saw around the world that there were a myriad of solutions for urban transportation
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that were based on tech and Turkey lacked all of them and I saw multiple examples for
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transportation super apps and I thought why not why not build one in Turkey because Turkey is
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a pretty large sizable country with 85, 90 million people in terms of population
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Istanbul, which is the largest city in the country, is the largest in Europe with around
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15 million people living in it. And there are more than 10 cities in Turkey with a population of over 1 million
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So it is a fairly large market. And we thought, why not start it and scale it little by little
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We began in 2018. In a pretty short amount of time, we became the number one mobility app on both Android and iOS app stores
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We've been growing ever since. Well, let's talk about that growth. How many riders do you have now
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What parts of Turkey are you in? And when you look at where you hope to go and be in another three years, where is that
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Well, we sort of began in, again, 2018, but we began with micromobility only
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And our goal was to build a large enough platform so that we could launch ride hailing when we were of size
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So we started doing Uber-style ride hailing in October of 2022. We were already the number one mobility app in Turkey at that point
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we had around 4 to 5 million users in 2022 And since then based on our significant growth we were able to build a driver base of
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around 260,000 drivers today, which is very significant. And we hope to finish the first
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quarter, you know, we hope to reach in March to around 290,000 drivers. That's around 10 times
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more than the number of taxis in the city of Istanbul, which is again, the largest in Europe
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So we are at a pretty significant size in terms of ride ailing
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When you think about the scale and the size of the market, we are already in four or five cities
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And those four or five cities have helped us become the unquestionable number one in transportation solutions in the country
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when we benchmark ourselves against the taxi market in istanbul there's around 750 000
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taxi trips in the city and when ride hailing arrives um that number tends to double so there's
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750 000 taxi trips in istanbul there's another 750 000 taxi trips in turkey in general this is
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per day and ride hailing doubles it that equals at you know when everything's said and done of a
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market size of daily 3 million trips in our country. And that's, you know, if you look at it
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in terms of dollars, a trip, a ride-hailing trip in Turkey is around $7 now. So that's a total of
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I want to say, $67 billion, $6 to $7 billion of gross merchandise value. Ride-hailing take rates
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globally are around 28, 29, maybe 30%. So if you apply those numbers
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that's $2 billion of potential revenue. That's our goal. That's where we want to get to
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And we are going there pretty steadily, but pretty strongly as well
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The future definitely, definitely looks bright. You're going to be fired up. I wanted to ask you
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what is the competition like from Uber and Lyft and how does marketing differentiate itself from them
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Look, globally speaking, there's more than Uber and Lyft, right? Every sort of G20 economy has a very large ride-hailing operator that has significant market share
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So in Northern America, that's Uber. In Europe, there's Uber Bolt. There's Cabify in Spain, right
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There's FreeNow in Germany. In the Gulf, there's Kareem. In India, there's Ola
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In China there Didi In Indonesia there Gojek In again that part of the world Southeast Asia Malaysia Thailand Philippines Indonesia there Grab There Kakao in Korea
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There's all these companies. There's Yandex in Russia, for example. There's all these companies in G20 economies that serve ride hailing at a very large scale
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That is the go-to solution for urban mobility. That's what we plan to do
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Turkey is a G20 economy. We're the 17th largest economy in the world with 85 million people
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And the market itself is large enough to support a fairly large mobility super app
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That's our goal. That's what we want to be. And in terms of competition, we tend to believe that the local player, the local champion in markets like Turkey always wins
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We look at Indonesia. We look at India. We look at the Gulf
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We look at all these places around the world that have a local champion who understands the field, who understands the country, who understands the people and can serve said people in the best way possible
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Global players come in, global players go. That's played out in multiple countries outside of Turkey
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And that's what we believe is going to play out in Turkey. The local champion is always more advantageous
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Absolutely. Listen, you alluded to this a little earlier, obviously being the local champion is the key, but when you look at plans to possibly bring Marta to other markets, expanding the services beyond ride hailing, what is the possibility
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Obviously, I know you want to focus on everything and dominate Turkey first, but what does that kind of look like in the possibilities going forward as well
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Our main goal, our sole focus, and we're like laser focused right now, is to catch Turkey up to the rest of the world when it comes to tech-enabled transportation
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If you come to Istanbul, A, you're going to love it. It's beautiful, right
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But B, you're going to realize getting around the city is super hard. Transportation infrastructure, unfortunately, is behind its peers
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But taxis completely suck. There is not enough taxis in the city of Istanbul to serve the city
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The quality is abysmal. and there's a lot of scamming, a lot of poor client management
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There's a lot of stuff out there, right? Borderline fraud going on
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if you want to take a cab in the city of Istanbul. It's very hard. We're here to fix that
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And once we do, we're looking at a market of $7 billion of GMB
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So right now, we are super focused on our local country, and to expand our services We only in like four or five cities right now and there are 81 in Turkey So right now the goal is to build a large mobility super app in Turkey
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akin to the names I mentioned. After that, I don't know. The future, I'm sure it's bright
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Even past us dominating the right-hailing space. After that, we acquire new players in other geographies
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or we go into other verticals in Turkey. Again, as I've said, maybe fintech, who knows
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But that's down the line. Right now, we have to build the most dominant, the best, the highest quality ride-hailing service Turkey can offer
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We want people in the city of Istanbul to press a button on their phone, click an app on their phone, and get a car within minutes
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That's economic. That's environmentally friendly. And it's just convenient. That's what we're after
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and we're getting there. That's perfectly said. And I was wondering, you know
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as far as, obviously, AI is huge these days. Are you incorporating AI into the service
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Are there plans for that going forward? Sure. I mean, like everybody else
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we're trying to make sure that you're not behind in the AI game
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We have a team that's working on it that's trying to understand it. But obviously, what's next for our business line
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is autonomous vehicles. Robotaxis, as they call them. AVs that drive people from point A to point B and act as taxis
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That's what's coming to our industry. On the micromobility side, scooters, e-bikes, e-mopeds
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we have AI-based tools that tell us where the demand is, where we should deploy our vehicles
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when they should be rebalanced to other places, when they should be collected
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what routes should be taken when those vehicles are collected from the streets, when should they be charged when should they be plugged in when should they be left uh to wait on
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the streets for the next user we have a pretty comprehensive ai tool on the micro mobility side
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but on the right ailing side it is all about the av game and we're um um very closely watching
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what's happening in that space. And we have a pretty educated stance, I'd say
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as to what's going to unfold in that market within the next five to 10 years. Now, definitely exciting times of future
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As bright future is here in many ways. Alper Akhtem, the CEO of Marty Technologies
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That was an absolutely fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for joining me today
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And nothing but the best going forward. Thank you very much, Dan. Have a good day
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