Marti Hit Its September Numbers in August
4.90 million riders, 584 thousand drivers, 30 cities. Türkiye's mobility super app cleared its September 30 ride-hailing targets with four weeks to spare, then raised them.
Companies set targets so they can hit them on the last possible day and call it discipline. Marti Technologies (NYSE American: MRT) did something ruder. It set a September 30 goal of 4.90 million ride-hailing riders and 580 thousand registered drivers, and then reported on Thursday that it had crossed both on September 2. That is a month early, in a business where a month is roughly 8 percent of the entire year.
The numbers as of September 2: 4.90 million riders and 584 thousand registered drivers. Year over year, riders are up 85 percent and drivers are up 57 percent. Marti says its drivers carry an average rating of 4.8 out of 5 and go through formal background checks before they are allowed on the platform, which is the sort of line that reads as boilerplate until you have taken a taxi in Istanbul at 2 a.m.
The more interesting number is the map. A year ago 35 percent of Marti's ride-hailing riders lived outside Istanbul. Now it is 46 percent. Drivers outside Istanbul went from 26 percent to 36 percent. A ten-city launch in August pushed the service to 30 cities, covering roughly 85 percent of Türkiye's GDP. In plain terms: this stopped being an Istanbul app and started being a country app, and the growth outside the capital of everything is outrunning the growth inside it.
Marti has already reset the goalposts: 5.65 million riders and 630 thousand registered drivers by December 31, 2026. From here that is another 750 thousand riders and 46 thousand drivers in four months. Given the run rate that just produced an 85 percent annual increase, the desk would not bet against it, though we would note that raising a target the same day you beat the old one is a very specific kind of confidence.
Why the market cares: McKinsey put Türkiye's taxi market at $9 billion to $12 billion in 2021 and expects ride-hailing to expand it to $15 billion to $20 billion by 2030. Istanbul's licensed taxi supply has been famously frozen for decades while the city kept growing, which is exactly the gap an app with 584 thousand registered drivers is built to fill. Marti started with scooters in 2018 and now runs ride-hailing, delivery, and rental e-mobility on its own software and IoT stack. The scooters got it the users. The cars are what the users apparently wanted.
The desk take: small-cap mobility stories usually ask you to believe a forecast. This one just asks you to read a calendar. Targets beaten early, geography widening, a new number already on the board. We will check back on December 31, or knowing this company, sometime around Thanksgiving.