In 2021, Meirambek Abelkassov and his partners launched JET, an e-scooter rental service. Today, the startup operates in eight countries and has grown to $48.7 million in annual revenue.
For the joint Digital Business and Astana Hub project, “100 Startup Stories from Central Eurasia”, Meirambek shared how much the company makes abroad, why people in Almaty use scooters at unusually high rates, and how the company plans to grow its revenue to $100 million a year.
“To get started, you need at least $90,000”
– Tell us how JET got started.
– I spent seven years in banking, mostly in sales. Then in 2017, I decided to go into business and launched a taxi service. When we were launching in Russia, I came across a kicksharing startup there, a short-term e-scooter rental service. I really liked the idea and the model: a scooter is faster than walking and cheaper than a taxi. So my partners and I decided to build something similar. That’s how JET came about in 2021. We started in Almaty first, and literally a week or two later, launched in Odessa.
We raised our first round right away, around $3.5 million. We needed that money to expand into other countries. In our first year, we also launched in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, and Serbia.
– Who were your partners?
– There are six of us co-founders: Serik Uspanov, Andrey Azarov, Mikhail Geysherik, Andrey Kolesnik, Ilya Timokhovsky, and me. When we launched, each of us took on a different part of the business. I was in charge of operations, so I handled hiring the team, managing the scooter fleet, and things like that. The other guys look after strategy, fundraising, setting up the company, finance, and IT.
People say six co-founders is a lot. But the business is pretty big too, so for us, it works.
– Which cities in Kazakhstan can you already use JET in?
– We operate pretty much across the whole country. We run the business ourselves in Astana, Almaty, and Shymkent. The other cities are handled through franchises so we don’t lose focus.
– How do you find franchisees?
– Most of the time, people reach out to us themselves. Say someone visits Almaty or Astana, sees the scooters, watches an interview somewhere, gets interested, and messages us saying, “We’d like to give it a try.” From there, they come to us, buy the equipment, and launch in their own city.
– How much money do you need for a launch like that?
– One scooter, including delivery and customs clearance, costs around $1,000. For franchisees, we sell used scooters for $300 each, because the service just wouldn’t pay off with brand-new ones. For a smaller city, you need at least 300 scooters. So you’re looking at a minimum of $90,000.
– How soon can the investment pay off?
– In Central Asia, our average check is about $1, and each scooter gets around two to four rides a day. So if we do a very rough calculation based on revenue alone, with those numbers, the scooters pay for themselves in about 250 to 500 operating days.
The economics really depend on the city. In Almaty, for example, demand is high, but so is the competition. There are four services operating here, and together they handle around 100,000 to 120,000 rides a day.
Average checks vary from country to country. In South America, for example, the average check is 2 to 2.5 times higher than in Central Asia. Then there are tourist cities, like Batumi in Georgia. During the high season, prices are higher there too.
“Almaty is on another level when it comes to activity”
– How can you tell whether scooters will be popular in a city?
– We mostly look at the overall transport situation in the city.
When it comes to the number of rides, Almaty is honestly on another level compared to anything I’ve seen. Nowhere else has that kind of activity. Even Moscow doesn’t really compare. They have way more scooters there, over 100,000 of them. But if you look at the numbers per capita, Almaty still comes out on top.
In second place are people in Ulaanbaatar, which is surprising, because it’s the coldest capital in the world and there’s basically no infrastructure there.
The one thing Almaty and Ulaanbaatar do have in common is a massive traffic problem. When a city has heavy traffic and getting around is difficult, people start looking for alternatives. What they want is predictability, like with the metro. You know that every day at 8:45 you can leave from this station, and the trip will take exactly 14 minutes. Shared e-scooters are probably the next most predictable option. It’s not like someone is going to block a bike lane. That reliability is what creates such strong demand.
– What else can affect the popularity of kicksharing?
– Sometimes a city doesn’t have ride-hailing apps, just old-school taxi dispatch services. People simply aren’t used to using apps yet. In that case, scooters are more of a leisure thing. For example, there might be a waterfront or some kind of promenade. You put 50 scooters there, and people ride them around on weekends.
But sometimes it’s hard to predict demand. When we were entering Petropavlovsk, I told the team, “Guys, be careful. It’s a very conservative city, so don’t buy a huge number of scooters right away.” But I was wrong. The results ended up being some of the strongest we’d seen across all our regional launches in Kazakhstan.
Paradoxically, cities with less sunshine tend to perform better. In warmer regions, people usually aren’t in as much of a hurry to get anywhere.
– Why are there so few rides in Astana, then? It’s definitely not a warm region, and it doesn’t have a proper metro system yet either.
– If you know your way around Astana well, you can still drive around pretty comfortably, even during rush hour, without getting stuck in the kind of terrible traffic you see in Almaty. Al-Farabi Avenue is jammed now during the day and at night, on Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays.
Almaty’s population has basically doubled over the past 10 years, and it doesn’t look like that trend is slowing down. Plus, Astana still has a lot of government workers. Riding a scooter in a suit probably isn’t the most comfortable thing. Almaty, on the other hand, has much more of a vibe. It’s more social, more of a city where people go out.
Now that the LRT has launched in the capital, we’ll see whether people start using scooters to get to the stations.
This year, we were late launching the season in Astana. We had moved some of the scooters to Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan.
– How did it happen that a Kazakhstani startup isn’t operating in Kazakhstan’s capital?
– A few things came together. Last year, I spoke in front of Kazakhstan’s president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. It was during Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev’s visit. I talked about how we need to build better infrastructure. That would ease a lot of the tension between pedestrians and drivers. If everyone has their own space, cars on the road, pedestrians on the sidewalk, and micromobility vehicles in bike lanes, it solves a lot of problems right away.
It played out in a pretty interesting way. My pitch was actually about Kazakhstan, basically, “Let’s build proper bike lanes here.” But Aliyev seemed to like the idea so much that he immediately called someone over and said something to them. After that, Baku really started pushing bike lanes and cycling infrastructure. So we had to move some of our scooters there to keep up with demand.
New scooters were supposed to be brought into Kazakhstan from China, but the delivery fell through. I think JET will be back in the capital within a month.
– What’s your market share in Kazakhstan compared with other kicksharing services?
– Our market share in Kazakhstan is over 70%. We have a much stronger presence in the regions. Bolt doesn’t go into smaller cities, their scooters are only in Almaty for now. And in Shymkent, for example, it’s just Yandex and JET operating there.
– Why do you think that happened?
– For the other services, Kazakhstan is just one market among many. For us, it’s our home market. We understand better which cities the service will actually work in and how demand shifts from season to season. And in kicksharing, it’s not the company that brings in the most scooters that wins. It’s the one that manages its fleet better.
“We were always looking for a big country where we could, in a sense, settle down”
– You’re the leading kicksharing service in Kazakhstan. What about other countries?
– In Uzbekistan, the market is probably split more or less evenly, because there are a lot of local startups and local players there too. And I mean this in a good way: they’re scrappy. They’re ready to fight for every intersection and get their scooters out there.
In Georgia and Azerbaijan, we’re the market leader. Pretty much all of our competitors there have shut down.
Mongolia is an interesting story. When we entered the market, we were among the first players there, and for a while we were the only one. Then Chinese services started coming in one after another. Now we’re competing with seven companies, and our market share is around 20%.
In Chile, we initially entered as the number three player, but now I think we’re on par with our competitors.
Our biggest success has been Brazil. We’re already operating in more than 40 cities there.
– Tell us about your move into Brazil. How did you manage to become the market leader there?
– We were always looking for a big country where we could more or less settle in and keep growing within that market. Because in Kazakhstan, it’s basically Almaty, Astana, and Shymkent, and after that, you’re looking at smaller cities. At that point, it turns into more of a sandbox game: you can launch in as many places as you want, but it won’t really move the needle.
We decided to take a closer look at Latin America. One of our co-founders had moved to Argentina and wanted to try launching the business in Buenos Aires. But Argentina was tough: the currency was unstable, with devaluation happening almost every week. So we started looking at other countries in the region. Brazil, with its population of 220 million, a huge number of million-plus cities, and solid infrastructure, turned out to be exactly what we were looking for. Like almost everywhere else in the world, kicksharing there works through tenders or quotas. So that’s the model we followed.
– How does the quota system work?
– The city government puts out a tender for micromobility services, so people can get around over short distances. The tender sets out the timeframe, the number of scooters, and the number of parking spots.
Then the services submit their applications: they show their business model, experience, equipment, and operational capabilities. Based on the tender results, the city chooses one or several operators and gives them a quota, for example, 1,000 scooters each.
After that, they look at how you operate. Say the tender was for 1,000 scooters per operator. If demand is high, you can apply to increase your fleet.
– Why would the city government want this?
– Services like ours help cut costs for the city, because people start switching from public transport to e-scooters. If you look at Almaty, for example, we save the city billions of tenge in public transport subsidies.
– The benefit is clear. But why have quotas at all? Why not just leave the market open to everyone?
– If you don’t regulate how many operators are on the market, things start getting messy. A city only has so much infrastructure, and it can only handle a certain number of vehicles. Say the infrastructure is built for 15,000 micromobility vehicles. Maybe 2,000 to 3,000 of those are privately owned, and the rest can be shared scooters. But if you bring 45,000 scooters into a city like that, they start taking over sidewalks and parking areas, getting in pedestrians’ way, and just sitting there unused. In the end, it’s bad for everyone: the city, the users, and the companies.
– What other promising markets do you see overseas?
– We apply wherever we see tenders and feel the country makes sense for us, somewhere we understand and can build in for the long term. The next promising market for us is Mexico. We’re working through tenders there too. Right now, we’re focused on two cities, San Pedro and Mexico City. In the first stage, we’re planning to put around 5,000 scooters there, and then scale from there depending on what we agree with the city authorities.
– In Mexico, the startup 1Fit ran into problems involving threats against its employees. How do you feel about risks like that?
– I’ve heard that story. I’d put it this way: as startups, we’re built very differently. 1Fit is pure tech. We’re more of a hardware and operations business. We deal with physical infrastructure: scooters are out on the streets, and they need to be serviced, moved around, protected, and coordinated with cities and local partners. We already have experience working in tough parts of Brazil, including favelas, the poorer neighborhoods in big cities. In Serbia, we also ran into local specifics: we got to know both the Albanian mafia and Roma barons.
When we enter new markets, we understand there may be risks we haven’t dealt with before in Kazakhstan or Central Asia. Mexico is no exception.
“Raised over $40 million, mostly from foreign investors”
– How much revenue did you generate in 2025, and what share of it came from international markets?
– In 2025, our revenue was $48.7 million. Kazakhstan accounted for around 15% of that, while Brazil made up half of the total. That balance is going to keep shifting toward international markets. I think in 2026, based on our forecasts, Kazakhstani cities will bring in just 4% to 5% of revenue.
– When did the company become profitable?
– Right away. We have high capital costs, so it was important for every city to be profitable operationally. We don’t have any loss-making cities, in any country.
– Now that most of your revenue already comes from abroad, and Brazil has become your main market, how do you define JET’s connection to Kazakhstan, including legally?
– JET is a Kazakhstani startup and an Astana Hub member. In that sense, we’re not planning to change anything. Our holding company is registered at the AIFC. For international investors, it’s a familiar setup: English law, a proper corporate structure, and clear rules for buying into the company and exiting later.
That’s important for us because we’re constantly raising money, both by selling equity and through debt. Our business is capital-intensive: the scooters are expensive.
– How much funding have you raised in total?
– Overall, we’ve raised over $40 million for the project. Our last round was done at a $70 million valuation.
Now we’re raising again, this time at a valuation of $120 million to $150 million. We have more than 100 investors, and most of them are international.
That figure doesn’t include debt instruments. We’ve issued green bonds several times. Investors buy the bonds, the company receives the money, and then pays it back with interest. They’re called “green” because the money goes toward environmentally friendly projects. In our case, that means developing micromobility and renewing our e-scooter fleet.
– Why did you decide to issue bonds?
– Because when the war in Ukraine started in 2022, we lost that market and had to move all our scooters out of the country. At the same time, Whoosh and Yandex entered Kazakhstan, and we urgently needed to expand our scooter fleet. But at that point, nobody was really investing. It was the venture winter. That’s when we decided to issue green bonds. That allowed us to upgrade the fleet in Almaty and Astana, and helped us keep the market from going to foreign companies.
– Tell us about your plans for 2026.
– Scaling in Brazil and launching in Mexico. In terms of revenue, we’re aiming to reach $90 million to $100 million. We’re going to grow aggressively, the way a startup should. Sometimes people say, “You’re already a mature, profitable company.” But I see it differently: as long as we’re still growing in multiples, we’re still a startup.