Marti Technologies, Inc. (AMEX:MRT) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Marti Technologies, Inc. (AMEX:MRT) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript May 21, 2026

Marti Technologies, Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $-0.09, expectations were $-0.35.

Operator: Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Marti Technologies First Quarter 2026 Conference Call. Before we begin, I’d like to mention that today’s earnings release and earnings presentation are available on Marti’s Investor Relations website at ir.marti.tech, where you will also find links to our SEC filings, along with other information about Marti. Joining me on today’s call are Oguz Oktem, Marti’s Founder and CEO; and Cankut Durgun ,Marti’s Co-Founder, President and COO. Before we begin, I’d like to remind everyone that statements made on this call as well as in today’s earnings release and accompanying earnings presentation contain forward-looking statements regarding our financial outlook, business plans, objectives, goals, strategies and other future events and developments, including statements about the market.

These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. These risks and uncertainties include those described in our filings with the SEC, today’s earnings release and the accompanying earnings presentation and are based on current expectations and beliefs as of today, May 21, 2026. In addition, our discussion today will include references to certain supplemental non-GAAP financial measures, which should be considered in addition to and not as a substitution for our GAAP financial results. We use these non-GAAP measures in evaluating and managing Marti’s business and believe they provide useful information for management and our investors. Reconciliations of the non-GAAP measures to the corresponding GAAP measures, where appropriate, can be found in today’s earnings release and earnings presentation as well as in our filings with the SEC.

With that, I will now turn the call over to Alper.

Oguz Oktem: Thank you all for joining us today to Marti’s First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. We believe ’26 is shaping up to be a defining year for Marti. — the year when the scale we have built begins translating into sustained financial performance and profitability. Reflecting on this transition, we are moving to quarterly financial reporting beginning this year so that we can share our progress more frequently as the business continues to accelerate. Our first quarter results provide strong early validation of our business strategy. We delivered triple-digit percentage revenue growth, a step change in gross margin and adjusted EBITDA that is now near breakeven, all while continuing to expand our platform and services across the country.

We have reached an important inflection point as it relates to our operating leverage. The company continues to evolve into Turkey’s leading mobility super app, offering 8 services and operating across 20 cities on a single integrated platform. These services include car, motorcycle and taxi ride-hailing, motorcycle and car delivery as well as our owned and operated e-bike, e-moped and e-scooter fleet. During the first quarter, ride-hailing remained our primary growth engine, expanding strongly both in Istanbul and in newer markets as adoption growing geographically. At the same time, we began to drive meaningful traction in our delivery service in Istanbul, demonstrating the power of leveraging our existing driver and consumer network to launch adjacent services efficiently.

This traction is evident not just in demand from consumers, validating our position within the marketplace, but also in the response from our drivers who are embracing the new way to expand their revenue opportunity within our platform. We also expanded our 2-wheeled electric vehicle footprint into 2 additional cities, leveraging a capital-efficient growth model that builds on the infrastructure already in place from our ride-hailing operations. This execution translated into strong financial performance. Revenue grew by 156% year-over-year to $15.4 million, reinforcing our confidence in achieving our ’26 revenue guidance of $70 million. Importantly, this growth is translating into profitability. Gross profit margin improved noticeably from 36.8% to 72%.

Gross profit increased more than fourfold to $11.1 million. Adjusted EBITDA loss improved to near breakeven. This trajectory supports our ’26 guidance target of $1 million of positive adjusted EBITDA. These results reflect what we believe is an important inflection point in Marti’s operating model. We continue to make progress towards our near-term goals and more importantly, building a long-term financial model focused on driving consistent profitability and cash generation. Overall, we believe that our continued execution across platform monetization, geographic expansion and multiservice integration is contributing to stronger financial performance and positioning the company to capture Turkey’s large and emerging mobility opportunity with greater efficiency and resilience over time.

Our improving financial and operational results are centered in our leadership position in the market. We are the #1 mobility app in Turkey across both iOS and Android platforms. We are also the only operator offering car and motorcycle hailing service at scale and the largest 2-wheeler electric vehicle operator in the country, complemented by our on-demand delivery services. We have reached 176.4 million all-time trips and 7.8 million all-time unique platform consumers since our launch. Our ride-hailing service continues to scale rapidly and as of March 31, ’26 has reached 3.9 million all-time unique ride-hailing riders and 496,000 registered drivers. These metrics reflect the strength of our multiservice platform, combining our mobility and delivery and our ability to consistently scale both supply and demand in a highly dynamic market.

Although we are the youngest player in Turkey’s urban mobility market, we are the clear market leader here. Globally, mobility markets are typically led by local champions who benefit from deep operational expertise, regulatory alignment and strong brand trust. Turkey is following this path with 4 of our — 4 of the 5 leading mobility apps operated by local companies. Today, Marti operates in 20 cities, representing approximately 80% of the country’s GDP, giving us the scale and the reach to become the default mobility platform nationwide. Increasingly, we are the option that consumers look to first, and we continue to add capabilities and offerings to serve consumers and make life in major cities across the country easier. Turkey has some of the most densely populated cities in Europe with significant systemic challenges in mobility.

This impacts day-to-day life for millions of consumers, and we believe our platform is well positioned to help directly address these needs in meaningful ways. During the first quarter of this year, our operating metrics continue to demonstrate the strength of Marti’s integrated multiservice platform. Unique platform consumers increased 89% year-over-year to 2.1 million, reflecting continued growth in consumer adoption across our expanding and diversifying platform services. At the same time, trips increased even faster, growing 93% year-over-year to 16.2 million trips total. We believe these network effects are an important driver of long-term growth and operating leverage. Our ride-hailing service continues to be the primary driver of all overall platform growth and consumer acquisition, consistently outperforming our internal growth targets through strong operational execution, expanding network density and ongoing platform improvements.

As of March 31 of this year, all-time unique ride-hailing riders grew by 101% year-over-year from 1.9 million to 3.9 million and all-time registered ride-hailing drivers grew by 70% year-over-year from 292,000 to 496,000. This continued growth reflects the strong scaling trajectory of our ride-hailing marketplace over the last several years. Between ’23 and ’25, all-time unique ride-hailing riders increased with a compound annual growth rate of 161%, while all-time registered ride-hailing drivers increased with a compound annual growth rate of 105%. Building on this momentum, we have set new higher targets going forward. Our targets for June 30, 2026, are 4.3 million all-time ride-hailing riders and 530,000 registered ride-hailing drivers. We believe these higher targets reflect our ability to continue scaling both demand and supply while improving network density and platform efficiency.

Following the launch of our dynamic pricing model in 2025, our automated dynamic pricing model is now live across all cities, while our new and enhanced matching algorithm is currently live across more than half of our operating footprint. Both initiatives were designed to improve service efficiency and strengthen rider and driver satisfaction. Following the strong growth of our ride-hailing marketplace, we’re also beginning to see encouraging momentum in the expansion of our delivery services. Although deliveries were only launched in Istanbul during the fourth quarter of last year, both consumer and driver adoption continued to accelerate throughout the first quarter of this year. Our ride-hailing ecosystem continues to serve as the foundation for scaling new services efficiently.

Existing market consumers are increasingly adopting additional services on the platform, while our established driver network is enabling us to expand delivery operations with limited incremental infrastructure requirements. On the consumer side, we are seeing strong cross-service engagement across the platform. Approximately 33% of car hailing consumers and 82% of motorcycle hailing consumers use these services after first engaging with other market service. In addition, 14% of car hailing consumers and 73% of motorcycle hailing consumers subsequently adopted additional services within the Marti platform. Multiservice engagement also continues to drive strong platform economics. During the first quarter of this year, trips per consumer were 2.8x higher and revenue per consumer was 2.3x higher for multiservice consumers compared to single service consumers.

We believe this reflects the growing utility and stickiness of our integrated multiservice platform. On the supply side, adoption of our delivery service by drivers has accelerated quickly even though the service has been live for only about 6 months. As of the first quarter of this year, 51% of motorcycle hailing drivers and 23% of car hailing drivers had completed delivery trips. Similarly, multiservice drivers completed significantly more trips than single-service drivers with trips for motorcycle drivers 2.3x higher and trips per car driver 2.5x higher. We believe this demonstrates the flexibility of our driver base and the operational benefits of leveraging an already scaled mobility network to launch adjacent services. Overall, we believe these trends validate our strategy of building an integrated mobility platform where ride-hailing drives initial scale and network formation, while additional services such as delivery further increase engagement and utilization across our platform.

I’d now like to turn over to my partner, Cankut, to present our financials.

Cankut Durgun: Thank you, Oguz. Our first quarter results reflect the operating leverage inherent in our platform model. We increased our quarterly trips 93% and the number of unique platform consumers who used our services at least once, 89% year-over-year. Trips per unique platform consumer rose to 7.9, reflecting improved service availability and cross-service platform usage. This was primarily driven by an increasing number of ride-hailing trips and consumers as a result of higher usage in our existing cities, new city launches, improved service availability and growing cross-service adoption on our platform. We outperformed our quarterly operational targets for both all-time unique ride-hailing riders and registered ride-hailing drivers in the first quarter of the year with riders increasing 101% and drivers growing 70% year-over-year.

As a result of the gradual decommissioning of our 2-wheeled electric vehicle fleet, our number of average daily 2-wheeled electric vehicles deployed decreased from 25,500 to 20,400 in the first quarter of 2026. On the financial side, revenue more than doubled year-over-year, while costs grew only modestly, driving a significant expansion in gross margin and bringing adjusted EBITDA to near breakeven. I’m now going to go into the details of our revenue and cost of revenue figures. Revenue more than doubled to $15.4 million in the first quarter of 2026. This represents 156% year-over-year increase, approximately 4x higher than our 2023 to 2025 revenue CAGR of 40%. This strong growth was primarily driven by the continued success of our platform subscription package monetization, increasing trips and unique platform consumers.

Cost of revenues increased just 14% to $4.3 million, significantly lagging our revenue growth rate. This reflects higher business volume across the platform, partially offset by a decrease in depreciation and amortization expenses. As a percentage of revenue, cost of revenues declined sharply from 63% in the first quarter of 2025 to just 28% in the first quarter of 2026. As a result, our gross profit increased more than 400% year-over-year from $2.2 million to $11.1 million quarterly, representing $8.9 million of improvement. Our gross profit margin expanded to 72% in the first quarter of 2026, up from 37% in the first quarter of 2025. This reflects the strong monetization of our platform and improving unit economics at scale. Adjusted EBITDA improved by $3.1 million year-over-year, narrowing from negative $3.6 million in Q1 2025 to negative $0.5 million in Q1 2026.

Our adjusted EBITDA margin improved from negative 60% to negative 3%, representing a significant improvement of 57 percentage points year-over-year. Based on our first quarter performance and continued operational momentum, we remain confident in our full year 2026 guidance of $70 million in revenue and $1 million of positive adjusted EBITDA. Our revenue of $15.4 million already represents 22% of our full year revenue guidance. In contrast, our first quarter 2025 revenue of $6 million represented 15% of our 2025 full year revenue. In addition, as of the first quarter, we’ve already achieved $9.4 million of the total $30.8 million revenue increase that we expect for the full year. Our adjusted EBITDA of negative $0.5 million in the first quarter represents a $3.1 million year-over-year improvement.

This is 24% of the $13.1 million total full year improvement necessary to reach our 2026 full year guidance. So we remain confident in both the revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance that we’ve set for the year. The guidance reflects the continued execution of our strategy, the scaling of ride-hailing across our 20-city footprint, the growing adoption of our delivery services, disciplined cost management and the build-out of product capabilities to support a larger and more complex operational platform. Thank you for participating today, and we’d be glad to address any questions.

Q&A Session

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Today’s first question is coming from Jack Halpert of Cantor Fitzgerald.

John Halpert: I just have 2, please. So one on the top line and monetization specifically. Can you just talk about where you stand on the monetization of new markets? And how much of the growth for the rest of the year is expected to come from kind of turning on new market monetization versus just deepening the monetization and usage metrics in current markets? And then I’ll just squeeze the second one in here really quickly on the two-wheeled strategy. So obviously, you expanded into 2 additional cities during the quarter. I know you previously indicated that you were looking into the kind of long-term strategy here. Has anything changed in your longer-term view of where two-wheeled fits into the overall business strategy?

Cankut Durgun: Thanks, Jack, for the questions. I’ll address the first one and hand it over to Alper for the second. So on the monetization, we are currently monetizing all of the existing cities that we foresee monetizing in 2026. So the revenue forecast for the year assumes no further monetization beyond the existing cities. It also does not assume any increase in the rate of monetization across our existing cities. It is purely a function of volume growth. Any additional cities that we would monetize as well as any potential increases in the take rate at which we monetize would be upside relative to the revenue forecast that we’ve shared so far.

Oguz Oktem: I’ll comment on the two-wheeled strategy. Well, as I’ve told in detail, being a multiservice platform benefits us immensely, both because users that use more than one service on our platform have higher usership, which then reflects into better metrics per user, but also it is important as a gateway into our platform. So two-wheeled electric vehicles are billboards themselves on the streets, people can engage with them. They are really easy to rent and download the app. You can scan the QR code. And it is actually much cheaper and a much more efficient method of user acquisition than digital marketing per se. So we enjoy having our two-wheeled vehicle fleet on the streets of Istanbul and other cities because it helps consumers that did not know what Marti was or was not familiar with our services to just start engaging with our platform and then move into other and more profitable dimensions for us such as ride-hailing.

The number of people who have written an e-scooter, e-moped, e-bike, that then have used our ride-hailing services is actually quite high, and we plan to expand as much as possible, building on the ease of user acquisition through this method.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question is coming from Dick Ryan of Oak Ridge Financial.

Richard Ryan: Congratulations on a very strong quarter. And also moving to quarterly financial reporting, I think that improves the transparency significantly in your story. Cankut, on the — starting off, gross profit, very strong at 72%. What’s the sustainability of that? That’s significantly higher than what we were looking at. And I know you’ve got labor costs and insurance working in your favor. What else was the kickers for the gross profit margin improvement? And how sustainable is that?

Cankut Durgun: Yes. Thanks, Dick. So the main reason for the year-over-year gross margin improvement is that our monetization commenced in the fourth quarter of 2024. And therefore, in the first quarter of 2025, both from a number of cities monetized as well as from take rate level, it was still in its early stages. And I believe the full year 2025 gross profit margin was around 61%. And as of the first quarter of this year, we’ve seen a continued increase in that to 72%. Do we foresee additional marginal increases? Possibly. However, once you start getting to 70%, 80% gross margins in what is and sort of online-to-offline business like where there are certain variable costs, the ones that you alluded to, right, labor costs being a major one, insurance costs being another one.

Even though Turkey does have advantages in both of those cost dimensions relative to other international ride-hailing firms, in terms of, one, the sort of relatively lower labor cost as a ratio of the revenue per trip and also as a result of the lower incidence of insurance costs, those costs do exist. And therefore, there is going to be a ceiling, not too far different from the 70%, 80% figures that we are already approaching in terms of the gross profit margins that we can operate with.

Richard Ryan: Okay. Great. One more. On the number of trips, it was down sequentially from the fourth quarter, obviously, up 90-some percent year-over-year. Is there seasonality that now that we can start seeing some quarterly progressions? Or why did we see the little dip in trips from Q4 to Q1?

Cankut Durgun: That’s right. So the Ride-hailing business globally is one where different cities and different countries exhibit different seasonality. So what we’ve seen is that in some countries and cities, you see faster growth in the summer months. In other countries and cities, you see faster growth in the winter months. Each year, in Turkey, what we’ve seen is that the summer months are when most of the growth takes place. And if you look at this chart as well, right, what you’ll see is that from Q4 2024 to Q1 of 2025, there was actually a small decline in trips, but that did not come at the expense of the 2x year-over-year growth. And we’re seeing the same, right, this year as well in the winter months from Q4 2025 to Q1 2026, there was a relatively smaller decline than in the winter of bridging 2024 to 2025. but the growth and the year-over-year growth metrics and our forecast remain intact.

Oguz Oktem: Obviously, Turkey is in the Northern Hemisphere with a moderate Mediterranean climate. So you see these patterns in countries that are like Turkey, weather-wise, like Italy, France, Spain, Greece, et cetera. Summer months, especially the beginning of summer is a big growth period for us. Also year-to-year changes in rain patterns really affect us. For example, over the past 2 years, winter started late and ended late. As a result, months of November and December were better than expected, but months of like March and April were worse than expected. So it changes every year, but the pattern is pretty similar all the time.

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, that brings us to the end of today’s question-and-answer session. We would like to thank everyone for their participation and interest in Marti. This concludes today’s event. You may disconnect your lines or log off the webcast at this time, and enjoy the rest of your day.