Getir

Getir didn't invent home delivery, but it invented something more specific and ambitious: the 10-minute promise. Founded in Istanbul in 2015 by Nazim Salur — a serial entrepreneur with two prior exits — Getir built a model radically different from Deliveroo or Glovo. Not restaurant aggregators, not supermarket couriers: proprietary dark stores, a curated SKU of products (around 2,000 references versus 30,000 in a supermarket), and hyperlocal logistics infrastructure with riders always ready to go. The model worked in Turkey, where operating costs were low, Istanbul's urban density was extreme, and consumers were accustomed to on-demand services. Getir rapidly dominated the domestic market, building the quick-commerce playbook before the concept even had a recognized name in the West. COVID in 2020 changed everything. Home delivery demand exploded everywhere. Getir attracted Sequoia, Tiger Global, SoftBank, and Mubadala. Between 2021 and 2022 it raised $2.3 billion. By summer 2022, with valuation estimates reaching $12 billion, Getir had become Turkey's most valuable startup and one of Europe's hottest unicorns (at least for its European operations). But the international expansion strategy was aggressive to the point of recklessness. Getir opened dark stores in London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Madrid, Milan, New York — often in markets where labor costs were three or four times those in Turkey, where gig economy regulation was increasingly strict, and where competition was crowded (Gorillas, Flink, Gopuff, Deliveroo, Amazon). To gain market share, Getir practically gave away deliveries and products: the customer acquisition cost was unsustainable. In December 2022, Getir acquired German competitor Gorillas — also a unicorn, also struggling — hoping to consolidate Western Europe and reach critical scale. It was a mistake. Integrating one structurally loss-making operation into another doesn't generate efficiency: it multiplies losses. In 2023, Getir cut 14% of its global workforce (around 4,000 people). In June 2023 it closed Spain, Italy, and Portugal. In April 2024 — two years after its $12B peak — Getir announced exit from all international markets: UK, Germany, France, USA. Over 1,500 employees lost jobs in the UK alone. The company said it would focus all resources on the Turkish market, the only one where it had ever achieved something resembling profitability. European quick-commerce as a category was essentially dead: Gorillas absorbed and then abandoned, Flink scaled back, Gopuff withdrawn from Europe. Getir still survives in Turkey, where it still controls the domestic quick-commerce market. But the $2.3B European bet had generated zero return. The lesson was written in the model from the start: a business built on Turkish operating costs cannot be exported to markets with Northern European wages without a fundamental reconfiguration of unit economics.