The $435 Million Goodbye: How Uber Swallowed Getir — and What It Means for Turkish Tech

Founded in Istanbul in 2015 by a serial entrepreneur with a vision of ten-minute grocery delivery, Getir once dazzled the world with an $11.8 billion valuation and a presence in a dozen countries. Ten years on, Uber has bought what remains. The story of how it got here is a masterclass in both the promise and the peril of Turkish tech ambition.

On 9 February 2026, Uber Technologies announced it had reached an agreement to acquire Getir’s food and grocery delivery operations in Türkiye for a total of up to $435 million — $335 million in upfront cash for the food delivery business, and a further $100 million for a 15% stake in the grocery, retail, and water delivery portfolio. The seller was not the founders who built Getir. It was Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund that had taken control of the company in a bruising restructuring battle in 2024 and 2025. Getir’s founder Nazım Salur was not in the room.

That detail — who was and was not present at the moment of exit — tells you almost everything about Getir’s remarkable, turbulent, and ultimately cautionary decade. It is a story about the extraordinary speed of the pandemic tech boom, the equally extraordinary brutality of what followed, and the specific pressures facing Turkish technology companies that expand globally and find themselves dependent on sovereign wealth capital when the tide turns.

From Ten Minutes to Ten Billion

Getir was founded in Istanbul in 2015 by Nazım Salur, Serkan Borançılı, and Tuncay Tutek. Its founding insight was simple, audacious, and turned out to be years ahead of its time: that urban consumers would pay a premium for grocery delivery measured in minutes, not hours. The company built a network of dark stores — small, strategically located fulfilment centres — and a fleet of couriers on e-bikes and electric mopeds. The Getir Super App became Türkiye’s first true super app, connecting users with groceries, more than 100,000 restaurants, and local merchants. Its AI-driven micro-logistics architecture was genuinely innovative.

When the Covid-19 pandemic arrived in 2020, Getir’s model — already proven in Istanbul — suddenly seemed like the future everywhere. Investors poured in. The company raised $2.4 billion in total, its valuation soaring from $2.6 billion in early 2021 to $11.8 billion in a Series E round of $768 million in 2022. Mubadala led that round, becoming Getir’s largest shareholder and the backer of roughly 80 per cent of all capital raised since 2021. The company expanded aggressively: the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Spain, the United States. It acquired US grocery delivery firm FreshDirect and Turkish online marketplace n11. By 2022, Getir was one of the most valuable startups in Europe and a symbol of what Turkish tech entrepreneurship could achieve on the global stage.

“Knowing what I know now, I would never have taken Mubadala as an investor.”

The Crash

What followed was as swift as the ascent. When pandemic lockdowns eased and consumers returned to physical shops, demand for ultrafast delivery cooled sharply across all markets. The unit economics that had looked viable at scale proved fragile at the margins. Getir was burning through cash in markets where it had invested heavily to build market share it could not sustain. In April 2024, the company exited the US, UK, and European markets — the territories that had generated just 7 per cent of revenues but consumed a disproportionate share of costs — laying off thousands of staff. The UK withdrawal was particularly painful: British employees who had joined during the expansion phase found themselves without jobs, and the high-profile Getir branding that had briefly become familiar on London streets disappeared almost overnight.

The retreat to the home market of Türkiye exposed the scale of the problem. Getir’s group assets were valued at just $374 million in court documents — a stunning fall from a peak of $11.8 billion. The company had raised $2.4 billion. The writedown was, by any measure, catastrophic.

The Uber Deal

The acquisition announced on 9 February 2026 is, for Uber, a story of strategic consolidation. The company has been systematically building a dominant position in Türkiye’s digital economy. In May 2025 it acquired a majority stake in Trendyol Go, the Turkish food and grocery delivery platform affiliated with the Trendyol e-commerce giant, in a deal worth $700 million. That gave Uber an immediate, large-scale delivery operation in a market it had previously served only with ride-hailing. The Getir acquisition completes the picture: Uber now owns the two largest food and grocery delivery platforms in Türkiye.

The commercial rationale is clear. Getir’s food delivery business generated more than $1 billion in gross bookings in 2025 — a 50 per cent increase year-on-year — despite the company’s wider difficulties. The Turkish delivery market is growing rapidly, with a young, digitally sophisticated, urban consumer base and a culture of app-based convenience that is among the most developed in the region. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has described Türkiye as a ‘thriving digital economy’ and committed to long-term investment. The combined Getir-Trendyol Go operation, once integrated, will create a delivery network of dominant scale.

Under the deal structure, Getir users will continue to access delivery services through the Getir Super App, but with access to Trendyol Go’s restaurant network. Trendyol Go users will be able to order groceries from Getir through the Trendyol Go app. Getir CEO Batuhan Gültakan described the deal as a ‘significant milestone’ and a ‘testament to the strong operating model’ the company had built in Türkiye — a framing that somewhat elides the circumstances that made the sale necessary.

The Numbers That Tell the Story

• Getir — A Decade in Numbers
• 2015  Getir founded in Istanbul by Nazım Salur, Serkan Borançılı, Tuncay Tutek
• $2.4bn  Total capital raised over Getir’s lifetime
• $11.8bn  Peak valuation, reached in 2022 Series E round
• $768m  Series E round size — led by Mubadala
• $374m  Group asset valuation in 2025 court documents
• $335m  Cash paid by Uber for Getir’s food delivery business
• $100m  Uber’s investment for 15% stake in grocery/retail/water delivery
• $700m  Uber’s 2025 acquisition of Trendyol Go
• $1bn+  Getir food delivery gross bookings in 2025 — up 50% year-on-year
• 87,000+  Getir business partners as of deal date

What It Means for Turkish Tech

For the broader Turkish startup ecosystem, the Getir story is a complicated inheritance. On one reading, it is a failure: a company that raised $2.4 billion, achieved a $12 billion valuation, and was sold for $435 million — a fraction of its peak, and in circumstances that stripped its founders of control. On another reading, it is a success: a Turkish startup that genuinely changed consumer behaviour in a dozen countries, pioneered a logistics model now used globally, built the infrastructure for what is now a billion-dollar market in Türkiye, and attracted the sustained interest of one of the world’s largest companies.

For TBMag readers — whether based in London or Istanbul, investors or entrepreneurs — the Getir story is also a lesson in the specific risks facing Turkish companies that expand globally on sovereign wealth capital. When Mubadala invested at the Series E peak, it was backing a company at maximum optimism and maximum valuation. When conditions changed and the restructuring became necessary, the power dynamics shifted entirely. Salur’s description of Mubadala’s behaviour as an ‘illegal coup’ — and his ongoing $700 million lawsuit in London’s High Court, which we cover in detail alongside this article — reflects the experience of a founder who discovered, very late, what it means to have a $300 billion sovereign wealth fund as your largest shareholder in a downturn.

The acquisition by Uber also raises questions about Türkiye’s digital sovereignty that the country’s tech community will be debating for some time. Getir began as a Turkish company, solving a Turkish problem, in a Turkish city. Its exit as a Uber subsidiary — following the earlier Trendyol Go acquisition — means that Türkiye’s food and grocery delivery market is now substantially controlled by a US corporation. That is not inherently a bad outcome, and Uber’s stated commitment to long-term Turkish investment is real. But it is a different outcome from the one the founders originally imagined.