Everyone talks about the Series A funding gap in Turkish VC. It’s great to see investors actually doing something about it.

That’s what I particularly admire about the founders of Oleka Capital. Having built and exited two companies himself, İlker Sözdinler saw firsthand the need for more growth-stage capital—and decided to do something about it.

I sat down with İlker at Slush’d Istanbul for a short TRVC conversation about his journey from entrepreneur to investor, and what Turkish startups need to succeed internationally. Some great insights on hiring local talent, spending on sales and marketing, and the mindset changes required to scale.

Watch my conversation with İlker Sözdinler co-founder of Oleka Capital →

For more on Oleka, revisit my earlier, longer TRVC interview with İhsan Elgin on Oleka Capital and growth-stage investing.

And in a timely development, e2vc has just announced a new $150 million target growth fund, investing from Series A through C. Another welcome effort to address this gap!

Enis Hulli was one of my early guests on TRVC. You can revisit our conversation with Enis Hulli on e2vc's investment strategy and the Turkish VC ecosystem—and perhaps we'll have him back to discuss the new growth fund..

Good to see the Turkish VC ecosystem continuing to mature.

Yunus

DN Capital has roughly 1 billion USD under management and has been around for 25 years, with a track record of 22 exits including Germany’s largest tech IPO with AUTO1, an IPO on the NASDAQ with Remitly, and Germany’s largest AI exit at the time with Cognigy.

More than one diaspora

During our conversation, I recalled an earlier episode of TRVC, the Turkish VC podcast, with Cenk Bayrakdar of Revo Capital. We had discussed an evolution in their investment focus: from Turkish companies operating in Turkey, to Turkish companies expanding abroad, to founders from Turkey establishing businesses overseas.

That last group is often described as “the Turkish diaspora.” But the term can obscure some meaningful differences.

I find it useful to think about at least four overlapping groups:

1. Founders who build in Turkey and then expand abroad.
They may move themselves or part of their leadership team to another market while keeping substantial operations in Turkey. Their connections to talent, customers, and other founders at home are often active and immediate.

2. People who leave Turkey and subsequently become founders.
They may move for education or work and start a company years later. Their businesses emerge from experience gained abroad, while their relationships in Turkey can still shape whom they hire, partner with, or turn to for advice.

3. Second- and third-generation entrepreneurs with Turkish roots.
Their relationship with Turkey may be very different. They may have grown up in Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, or elsewhere, and built their professional networks there. We should make room for that experience on its own terms, without assuming that their identity or business ambitions centre on Turkey.

4. Investors, operators, and community builders who connect these worlds.
An ecosystem also depends on people who introduce a founder to a first customer, help recruit an early executive, explain an unfamiliar market, or make an investment. These connections can be valuable long before someone starts a company—and whether or not they ever do.

These aren’t rigid categories. People move between them, and the fourth cuts across the others. But the distinctions matter because each group has different relationships, needs, and ways to contribute.

A founder who has just moved from Istanbul to London might need help navigating an unfamiliar investment community. Someone who grew up in Germany might already know that community well, but have relatively few connections to the technology sector in Turkey.

Calling both “diaspora founders” is a starting point. Understanding their actual experience is what makes a useful connection possible.

What having “two hearts” can mean

Gülsah brings a personal perspective to this discussion. Her parents and grandparents are Turkish, and she described coming to Istanbul as something close to coming home.

She also co-founded 2hearts, a community supporting people with migrant backgrounds in the European technology ecosystem. In our conversation, she describes its practical work: people helping one another with introductions, jobs, questions about setting up a company, and access to investment.

The idea behind the name is simple: having a connection to two cultures can be a source of strength.

That resonates with me. Familiarity with different countries can help someone spot an opportunity others miss, understand a customer differently, or connect people who would otherwise never meet. But those possibilities need relationships through which to become useful.

This is where community building matters. A shared background can open a conversation. Trust, practical help, and repeated interaction turn it into something lasting.

The connections have to work both ways

Gülsah describes Turkey as a “hidden diamond,” pointing to its technical capabilities and the opportunities she sees beyond the sectors for which it is already well known.

That raises a question: how do more people get to see those capabilities for themselves?

Events like Slush’d Istanbul help. They give international investors and operators a chance to meet founders, see what they are building, and develop a more informed view of the market.

But near the end of our conversation, I wanted to turn the question around. Should more Turkish founders also be going out to events and communities abroad? Gülsah’s answer was emphatic: yes.

I think both directions deserve equal attention. We want more investors to come to Istanbul. We should also encourage founders to spend time in the markets where they want to win customers, recruit people, and raise capital.

The value of an international event can unfold over months or years: a conversation that continues, an introduction to a potential customer, a better understanding of how buyers think in another market. Those relationships need time to develop.

Diaspora communities can help make the first introductions. Founders then have to build on them.

Looking beyond familiar sectors

Our conversation also covers DN Capital’s investment approach, its investment in banking technology company Fimple, and Gülşah’s interest in healthcare AI.

Her healthcare example is particularly concrete: helping doctors make sense of patient records that can run to hundreds or thousands of pages. We discuss Evidently and the potential to bring relevant information into a form clinicians can use more readily.

It also leads to a broader point about building across markets. The same technology can face very different conditions depending on the availability of digital records, existing workflows, and the institutions that will use it.

A new conversation each week

This episode is the beginning of a series of short conversations recorded at Slush’d Istanbul. Over the coming weeks, I’ll share more perspectives from the event, alongside my own reflections on what they mean for the ecosystem.

Thank you to Gülsah for sharing her perspective—and for the work she’s doing to connect founders, investors, and communities across borders.

Watch the first episode with Gülşah Wilke

This week’s guest is different. Cenk Bayrakdar and Revo Capital need little introduction to anyone who follows Turkish venture capital. Revo is now on its third fund and has grown from an initial $15 million commitment to roughly $300 million across its funds and co-investment vehicles.

But Revo wasn’t always an established institution. Cenk started it in 2013, when the Turkish VC industry as we know it today barely existed.

It makes me wonder: of all the new funds being created in Turkey today, which ones will we look back on 10 or 15 years from now and realize we were watching the beginning of something much bigger?

From product to venture capital

There was another reason I particularly enjoyed this conversation: Cenk comes from a product and technology background.

Before Revo, he spent years at Turkcell building products, platforms and technology businesses. As someone who also came into the startup and investment world through product, I found this part of his story especially interesting.

And one story from those years really stayed with me.

Cenk’s team had developed a SIM-based mobile wallet solution and deployed it at Swisscom. It worked, and according to Cenk was well ahead of the competing solution. Yet Swisscom didn’t buy it.

Cenk recounts the person leading the project telling him that she knew Turkey as a great holiday destination, but couldn’t get past the idea of buying technology from Turkey. Swisscom chose the second-best solution instead.

I found that story surprising — even shocking.

For Cenk, it became something of a personal mission: he had seen firsthand the quality of Turkish technology talent and wanted to prove that it could compete globally.

From Turkish startups to global companies

That motivation also helps explain how Revo’s investment strategy has evolved.

Fund I was much more Turkey-focused. By Fund II, Revo had become deliberate about helping its companies go global. Cenk puts it memorably in the conversation: “Turk to Turk never sells good; it should be Turk to global.” Of Fund II’s 19 investments, he says 16 now have their headquarters outside Turkey.

With Fund III, that thesis is evolving again. Revo is not only helping companies from Turkey expand globally. It is also looking for Turkish founders who are already abroad and trying to reconnect their companies with Turkey — particularly by helping them establish R&D operations here.

That strikes me as an important evolution in how we think about the Turkish startup diaspora. A founder moving to San Francisco doesn’t represent talent that Turkey has “lost.” A globally headquartered company can still build a substantial engineering organization in Turkey.

We cover much more in the conversation — Revo’s three funds, institutional investors such as IFC and EBRD, exits, what Cenk sees Turkish founders getting wrong, Revo’s new San Francisco presence, and even the AI systems Revo is building internally for sourcing and portfolio management.

But for me, the thread running through it all is the same one that started with that Swisscom experience: how do you take the technology talent that exists in Turkey and give it the platform to compete globally?

Watch the full episode on YouTube or listen on Spotify

🎙️ TRVC 37: From $15M to $300M: Building Revo Capital | Cenk Bayrakdar

Gaming is perhaps the best example. Turkey is number one in the world in mobile gaming. That is an extraordinary achievement. And it isn’t something we say loudly or often enough.

My guest on the latest episode of TRVC, Görkem Türk, is someone I particularly appreciate for being a consistent voice on this. He doesn’t shy away from pointing out just how successful Turkey has become in gaming—and backing that conviction with investment.

Görkem spent years at Google working closely with many of the people building Turkey’s gaming ecosystem before founding Laton Ventures in 2023. What Laton has accomplished since then is remarkable for a first-time fund.

Laton started with a relatively small first close and has grown to around $70 million across its fund and related vehicles. It was an early investor in Grand Games, investing at the idea stage, and has continued backing the company through subsequent rounds. More recently, it invested in Rotate Lab, the Gaziantep-based team behind Cube Land.

Turkey has developed a real cluster of expertise in mobile gaming: founders who have built global companies, employees who have learned how to scale them, investors who understand the economics, and a growing number of new teams taking that accumulated knowledge and starting again.

Peak helped establish what was possible. Dream Games followed. Now companies such as Grand Games and Rotatelab are adding another generation to the story.

And global capital has noticed. Görkem shared a remarkable statistic during our conversation: roughly 75% of external global gaming VC investment over the previous 12 months had gone into companies in Turkey. Whatever way you look at it, the concentration of international attention on Turkish gaming is striking.

This matters beyond gaming, because success creates its own flywheel. International investors who initially come to Turkey looking at gaming discover founders and opportunities in other areas. People who learn user acquisition, product development and data-driven growth inside gaming companies take those skills elsewhere. Successful founders become investors and mentors to the next generation.

That is how ecosystems develop. Part of building an ecosystem is also identifying the things that are working exceptionally well, understanding why they worked—and celebrating them. That is also part of what I hope TRVC can contribute.

I want these conversations to become a record of how the Turkish venture ecosystem developed: the people who built it, the investors who financed it, and the areas where Turkey became genuinely successful. (Ok, we’ll also point out the challenges along the way too.)

Gaming is one of those success stories. And Görkem and Laton are now very much part of its next chapter I hope you enjoy the conversation.

🎙️ TRVC 36: Inside Turkey’s $Billion Gaming Boom | Görkem Türk, Laton Ventures
(Youtube } Spotify)

This is episode 36 on my road to at least 100 conversations with Turkish VC investors. If you like what I’m doing with TRVC, as always, please share this with someone who might enjoy it too. Thanks!

Yunus

So I was very happy to have Şan Yalman, co-founder of Istanbul Slush’d and Investment Associate at Intera, as my guest for TRVC #35.

Şan has an interesting perspective on venture capital. He lives in London and, through his work at Intera, a Turkish family office, invests as an LP in VC and private equity funds in the US and Europe. We talk about what he has learned from sitting on that side of the table, the power law in venture funds, and why smaller and emerging funds can sometimes have particularly compelling economics.

But much of our conversation is about Istanbul Slush’d—and what Şan, Melisa Çağlar and their team are trying to build. Their ambition from the beginning was not simply to create another local startup conference. As Şan puts it in our conversation, Turkey has interesting talent and opportunities, but we need to bring in more global capital. That resonates with me.

I believe deeply in the quality of entrepreneurial talent we have in Turkey. But ecosystems don’t develop in isolation. Founders need connections—to customers, other founders, experienced operators, and capital. And the more bridges we can build between Istanbul and the major technology and investment hubs around the world, the stronger our ecosystem will become. Slush’d is doing a very good job of building one of those bridges.

This year they are going bigger. Investors and technology leaders from organizations including Accel, Index Ventures, OpenAI and NVIDIA are coming to Istanbul. There is a new Investor Day bringing together local and global GPs and LPs, AI hackathons with OpenAI and Manus, and much more emphasis on matchmaking between founders and investors.

I also really like the spirit behind the organization itself. Şan and Melisa aren’t paid to do this. The core team is largely made up of young volunteers, inspired by the model of the original Slush in Helsinki. Part of the idea is that helping build the event itself can become a way for young people to enter the startup ecosystem, build relationships and find opportunities. That is ecosystem building in a very tangible sense.

Istanbul Slush’d takes place October 12–14. If you’re an investor, or simply part of the technology and entrepreneurship ecosystem, I’d encourage you to attend.I’ll be there, and I’m looking forward to seeing many of you there too.

And before then, have a listen to my conversation with Şan.

🎙️ TRVC #35 — Why Global Investors Are Coming to Istanbul | Şan Yalman, Istanbul Slush’d

▶️ Watch the full episode on Youtube, or Spotify etc.

As always, if you enjoy these conversations, please share the episode with someone who might find it interesting. It really helps TRVC reach more people in the ecosystem.

Yunus

If you help people build successful companies, the benefits go far beyond those companies themselves. They create jobs. They develop talent. They bring new technologies and ways of working into an economy. Successful founders become angel investors and mentors. Employees leave to start companies of their own. Plus over time, the effect compounds.

Didem has seen this process from an unusual vantage point. She was involved in building Endeavor Turkey in the early days of the Turkish startup ecosystem, and today she is a General Partner at Treeo VC, investing in founders making the leap into the US market.

Another idea from our conversation that stuck with me: Corporate Entrepreneurship Responsibility. We’re all familiar with Corporate Social Responsibility. Didem argues that companies (of all sizes) should also feel a responsibility to support the entrepreneurs around them. And not just by sponsoring startup events. Work with startups. Become their first customer. Run a PoC. Be a design partner.

For a young company, getting that first customer can be transformative. It gives them revenue, but more importantly it gives them a real environment in which to test their product, learn what customers actually need, establish credibility and build something other companies will also want to buy.

The corporation gets something too: access to the latest ideas and technologies without loss of focus. Sure you could take the idea and develop it yourself in-house, but isn’t it so much smarter to stay focused on what only your company can do?

I think Didem is right that we should see this as part of how a healthy entrepreneurial ecosystem works. Governments have a role. VCs have a role. Universities have a role. But established companies have an enormous role as well — not only as investors or sponsors, but as customers.

In our conversation, Didem and I also talk about how Turkey’s startup ecosystem has developed, why she describes it as being in its “adolescence,” what happens when Turkish founders make the leap to the US, the opportunities Treeo is seeing in AI, and her own journey from ecosystem builder to venture capitalist.

It’s TRVC conversation #34/100+: From Turkey to the US: Helping Founders Who Make the Leap | Didem Altop, Treeo VC

If you like these conversations, drop a quick “On to 100” (or just the 💯 emoji) under my LinkedIn post about this episode. Thanks!

— Yunus

I have been particularly interested in the shift toward deep tech lately because it raises an important question for our part of the world: what kinds of technology companies can Europe—and especially Turkey and Southeast Europe—actually have an advantage in building?

For much of the last decade, the venture playbook was dominated by software. Build quickly, keep capital requirements low, find product-market fit, and scale internationally. That model produced some remarkable companies, including in Turkey and Southeast Europe.

But something is changing.

AI is lowering the cost of building software, while geopolitics, energy security, defense, supply chains and technological sovereignty are pushing governments and investors to think much more seriously about the physical world again.

Energy. Robotics. Advanced materials. Space. Biotech. New manufacturing technologies.

In other words: deep tech.

Tarık and I spend a good part of this episode talking about why these companies require a different approach to venture investing. They can take longer. They often require more capital. The technical risk can be substantial. And evaluating a founder who is commercializing years of scientific research is very different from evaluating another SaaS company.

But the potential rewards—and the strategic importance—can also be enormous.

This is particularly relevant for Turkey and Southeast Europe.

The region has excellent engineers, strong technical universities, comparatively low development costs and, in certain industries, a surprisingly deep base of technical know-how. Turkey has already demonstrated how quickly an ecosystem can emerge once talent, capital, role models and ambition begin reinforcing one another. Gaming is perhaps the clearest example. Defense technology is another, albeit with a very different ecosystem and funding model.

So could something similar happen in deep tech?

That leads us into one of my favorite parts of the conversation: universities.

If Turkey wants to create more globally important deep tech companies, some of them will almost certainly have to come out of university laboratories. That means getting much better at turning research, intellectual property and highly specialized technical knowledge into companies that entrepreneurs and venture investors can actually build around.

We also talk about Tarık’s own journey—from private equity to e2vc and now Skybound—and what he has learned investing across Turkey and the broader region.

And, naturally, I asked him where he would place his bets.

Among the areas that come up are energy, space and nuclear technology, as well as the broader question of which sectors could produce Turkey’s next billion-dollar technology companies.

For anyone following venture capital and technology in Europe, Turkey or Southeast Europe, I think this is a particularly relevant conversation. It is not just about another new VC fund. It is about a potentially important change in what we consider a venture-backable technology company—and where the next generation of European technology champions might come from.

🎙️ TRVC #33 — From e2vc to Skybound: Building Europe’s Next Deep Tech Fund | Tarık Dutkuner

Watch the full conversation on YouTube, or listen on your preferred podcast platform.

Episode 33 also marks roughly one third of the journey towards my goal of 100 conversations with the investors and others building Turkey’s venture capital ecosystem.

And if you want to show your support, just hit reply and say “Hi!” That’s it. It may seem like a small thing, but it’s always great to hear from the people following along. Thank you to everyone who has sent me a short note so far.

33 down. 67 to go. See you at the next conversation.

Yunus

This week, that lens comes from Kaan Akın, Managing Partner at Tenity. (This episode is in Turkish.)

Now based on London, Kaan has worn many hats over the past decade: founder of the accelerator Hackquarters, builder of corporate innovation programs, angel investor, and now Managing Partner at Tenity. Created from the merger of Hackquarters and Swiss accelerator F10, Tenity now has roughly 230m USD in assets under management with investments in over 120 startups. That background makes for a fascinating perspective on how startups, corporates, accelerators, and venture capital all fit together.

Our conversation starts with the story of Hackquarters and follows its journey to becoming part of Tenity. Along the way, we discuss questions that are becoming increasingly relevant—not just for founders in Turkey, but for anyone interested in innovation:

• How useful are accelerator programs today?

• Does corporate innovation create real value, or is it mostly theatre?

• How is venture capital changing in the age of AI?

• Why are fundraising dynamics shifting?

I also enjoyed hearing his reflections on Turkey as a startup market. His perspective is nuanced: Turkey has exceptional founders and technical talent, but companies that aspire to build globally often benefit from thinking internationally much earlier than they traditionally have.

We finish with a Rapid Fire round covering missed investments, underrated founder traits, sectors he’d never invest in, and his book and podcast recommendations.

This is episode #32 of TRVC.

When I started the podcast, I set myself the goal of having 100 conversations with investors and the people building the Turkish startup ecosystem. The idea was simple: create a long-form archive of the people, ideas, and debates shaping venture capital and entrepreneurship in Turkey, with many episodes in English.

Thirty-two conversations in, I’m even more convinced it was the right project.

If you’ve been following the journey, thank you. And if this is your first episode, I hope you’ll join us for the next 68.

If you've enjoyed following my journey, the biggest way you can support the project is simply to share these conversations with others who care about the Turkish startup ecosystem. I'd also love your feedback: get in touch through LinkedIn or just leave a comment.

That is the problem my latest guest, Serhat Çiçekoğlu, Managing Partner at Sente Ventures, is trying to solve. In this new episode of TRVC – The Turkish VC Podcast (in English), we explore one of the least-discussed corners of venture capital: non-dilutive project financing for deep tech startups.

Instead of taking equity, Sente Ventures finances the construction of first-of-a-kind manufacturing facilities, helping founders bridge the gap between a successful pilot and full-scale commercialization.

Along the way, we discuss:

• Why deep tech requires a fundamentally different financing model than software startups

• Why commercialization—not technology—is often the biggest hurdle

• How project finance complements venture capital rather than replacing it

• Turkey’s opportunities—and shortcomings—as a deep tech ecosystem

• Why the venture industry may need to rethink how it finances capital-intensive innovation

🎙️ Watch the full episode here:

(also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts)

A while ago, someone asked me:

“Are there really more than 10 people to do a Turkish VC podcast episode with?”

This is now Episode 31 on my journey to 100 conversations with venture capital investors and ecosystem builders in Turkey and beyond.

The more conversations I have, the more convinced I become that we’ve only scratched the surface. There are so many thoughtful investors and ecosystem builders with unique perspectives still to feature. Yes the ecosystem is brand new, but that makes it all the more exciting.

If you’ve been enjoying these conversations, I’d love to have you along for the journey.

Subscribe to the YouTube channel and join me for the ride toward 100 conversations.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts after you’ve listened.

Yunus

That naturally raises a broader question. How do we create an ecosystem that enables more women to become founders, engineers, investors and technology leaders in the first place?

That is exactly what my latest TRVC podcast guest Nihal Güngör of SistersLab has been working on for years.

In our conversation, Nihal shares the story of building a social enterprise dedicated to increasing the participation of women and girls in STEM, supporting women in technology careers, and creating stronger networks and role models.

One thing I particularly appreciated about this discussion is that it avoids easy narratives.

Turkey has produced remarkable women founders and technology leaders. Several of the country’s biggest startup success stories include women among their founding teams. At the same time, there is clearly much more untapped potential.

Rather than asking whether Turkey is doing “well” or “poorly,” we explore what practical steps can help build an even stronger ecosystem.

We discussed:

• Why increasing women’s participation in technology benefits the entire startup ecosystem.

• The role of mentorship, communities and professional networks.

• Building and scaling a social enterprise from scratch.

• The importance of visible role models.

• Lessons learned from working with corporations, international organizations and public institutions.

• Why ecosystem building is a long-term investment.

The episode is also one of the shortest we’ve published on TRVC—around 25 minutes—making it an easy listen if you’re short on time. I hope you enjoy it.

This episode is in Turkish. The YouTube video has machine-created English subtitles and dubbing.

Listen

🎥 YouTube 🎧 Spotify 🎙️ Apple Podcasts

If you like these conversations about venture capital, startups and ecosystem building in Turkey and beyond, consider subscribing to the TRVC YouTube channel, or leaving a rating or a review in Apple Podcasts. I release a new episode every two weeks with investors and the people helping shape the Turkish startup ecosystem.

My guest this week is Alex Konoplyasty, Founder and General Partner of Flashpoint Capital, a firm that started as a venture growth investor focused on founders from Eastern Europe and other emerging markets, and has since expanded into growth debt and direct secondaries.

Today, Flashpoint manages over $600 million and invests in companies building for global markets, particularly the United States.

One reason I was excited about this conversation is that many of the challenges facing Turkish founders are not uniquely Turkish.

Questions around international expansion, fundraising, hiring talent, go-to-market, and exits are shared by founders across our broader region. Whether you’re building in Turkey, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, or elsewhere, the playbook for building a globally competitive technology company increasingly looks similar.

Alex brings a unique perspective, having spent years in investment banking before building Flashpoint into a platform spanning venture capital, growth-stage investing, and venture debt.

One quote from the episode that stuck with me:

“People know how to spray and pray money. People have no idea how to exit.”

Much of startup content focuses on startup fundraising and investment rounds. Alex places importance on what happens afterwards: building sustainable companies, creating strategic options, and ultimately generating successful exits.

We discussed:

• Building B2B startups that sell into the US market

• How Flashpoint helps companies scale beyond their home markets

• Why Europe struggles to produce venture-scale outcomes compared to the US

• The growing role of venture debt and when it makes sense instead of raising more equity

• How founders should think about dilution, growth financing, and capital strategy

• Why exits are the most overlooked skill in venture capital

• The difference between building a unicorn and building a valuable company

What I particularly enjoyed about this conversation was its practical perspective.

I hope this is the first of many conversations that place the Turkish startup ecosystem in a broader regional context and connect us with investors and founders across Eastern Europe and beyond.

🎙️ Watch the full episode on Youtube or Spotify, Apple Podcasts etc.

If you enjoy these conversations, please do subscribe to the YouTube channel or follow and like on LinkedIn — I really appreciate it. My goal with TRVC is to help other investors learn about and from the people building venture ecosystems both in Türkiye and across the wider region.

This week’s guest on TRVC, Yalın Karadoğan, is doing just that. After nearly three decades in private equity and growth equity at firms including JP Morgan Partners and Cinven, Yalın joined LeapFrog Investments, one of the world’s leading impact investment firms. Today, he focuses on investing in companies that both provide financial returns and make a contribution to the climate challenges ahead.

While Turkey is outside LeapFrog’s geographic investment mandate, Yalın remains actively involved in the Turkish ecosystem through the Türkiye Mozaik Foundation, a “charity of charities” that supports high-impact non-profit organizations working across a range of social issues in Turkey.

In a sense, he represents a broader trend that I find encouraging: members of the Turkish diaspora who have built successful international careers in investing, entrepreneurship, and technology, while continuing to contribute to Turkey in meaningful ways.

Our conversation explores the idea of impact investing: the belief that capital can be deployed in ways that generate attractive returns while also addressing important challenges in areas such as climate, healthcare, and financial inclusion.

In the episode we discuss:

• Why some of the world’s most sophisticated institutional investors are allocating capital to impact-focused strategies, how that pendulum has swung and where it is settling.

• The role of growth equity in helping companies scale solutions to large societal problems

• The relationship between philanthropy and investing

• Climate investing, emerging markets, and the opportunities created by long-term structural change

One of my takeaways from the conversation was that philanthropy and investing are often presented as separate worlds. But perhaps they are better thought of as complementary tools: some problems are best addressed through charitable giving. Others require entrepreneurs, sustainable business models, and long-term capital. The most interesting challenge is figuring out where each approach works best.

This episode is in Turkish.

Please subscribe to the TRVC YouTube channel, as it helps me grow the TRVC community and continue bringing great conversations from across the Turkish venture capital and startup ecosystem.

This week on TRVC, I sat down with Serkan Ünsal, founder of Startups.watch — the platform that has quietly become one of the core data sources behind the Turkish startup and venture capital ecosystem.

If you’ve ever seen quarterly Turkish VC funding numbers shared online, chances are there’s a good probability the underlying data came from Serkan and his team.

But this conversation went far beyond startup databases.

We talked about:

• why Turkey has become surprisingly strong at seed-stage investing

• why the ecosystem still struggles at Series A and growth stage

• how Turkish gaming companies became globally competitive

• why AI startups in Turkey are still early

• why Turkish startups often wait too long to globalize

• why acquisitions are still uncommon among Turkish corporates

• and what foreign investors actually think about the Turkish market

One thing I especially enjoyed was hearing Serkan’s perspective on the evolution of the ecosystem over the last 15 years — from a time when “startup” was barely a commonly used word in Turkey, to today’s much more mature venture ecosystem.

Before founding Startups.watch, Serkan worked at Ericsson Turkey and Turkcell, where he was involved in one of the earliest internal discussions around creating a corporate VC arm in Turkey back in 2008.

He later founded and exited his own startup, before a trip to Silicon Valley inspired him to build a platform tracking startup and investment activity in Turkey.

Today, Startups.watch contributes Turkish ecosystem data to international databases and ecosystem reports, helping ensure that Turkey is represented accurately in global startup rankings and analyses.

A few moments from the episode that stayed with me:

→ “Turkey is heaven for pre-seed and seed investment right now. But if you need more than $2 million, things become much harder.”

→ “Turkish founders often think the Turkish market is big enough. That can become a trap.”

→ “You don’t need to be in Silicon Valley to build a unicorn. Mindset matters more than location.”

→ “Many Turkish corporates still prefer building from scratch instead of acquiring startups — even when acquisitions would save them years.”

I also found the discussion around startup ecosystem data surprisingly fascinating:

• how investment data is actually collected

• why Teknoparks in Turkey are sitting on a treasure trove of data

• how global startup databases are often inaccurate for emerging markets

• and why reliable ecosystem data matters much more than most people realize

If you follow startups, venture capital, technology, or emerging ecosystems, I think you’ll enjoy this one.

Referenced in the episode

📚 Organizations / Platforms

• Startups.watch

• Crunchbase

• PitchBook

• CB Insights

• Dealroom

• Mattermark

• DataFox (acquired by Oracle)

• Revo Capital

• 212

• Inveo

• GlobalTurk

📚 Companies Mentioned

• Peak Games

• Dream Games

• TaleMonster Games

• Fimple

• Aposto

• Paribu

• BTC Turk

Thoughts? I’d love to hear them. Just comment on this post.

If you like the interviews, please consider hitting subscribe on youtube. It helps me measure the impact.

Thanks for reading and listening,

Yunus

From the early days of KOSGEB programs to hands-on work with TÜBİTAK, and later roles at Teknopark Istanbul, Sefa has seen the ecosystem evolve from the inside.

Today, with In4Startups, he’s trying to do something quite ambitious:
turn startup support into a system — one that matches founders with investors, corporates, and real commercial opportunities. (The episode was recorded in Turkish, but English subtitles and even an automatic dubbing to English is available on the Youtube video).

What we talked about

• How Türkiye’s startup ecosystem evolved from grant-driven programs to early-stage investing

• Why institutions like KOSGEB and TÜBİTAK played such a foundational role

• The behind-the-scenes impact of Türk Ekonomi Bankası in building early startup pipelines

• The shift from grants (hibe) to equity-based support (e.g. TÜBİTAK 1512 → 1812)

• Why “every startup needs funding” is often the wrong framing

• The real bottleneck: not capital, but customers

• How In4Startups analyzes and matches startups with the right partners

• Why Anatolia (outside Istanbul) is still under-explored as a source of startups

• The importance of building startups that solve real sector problems, not just software problems

• Alternative growth paths: partnerships, POCs, and early revenue instead of funding

A simple but important idea

One idea kept coming up during the conversation:

Most startups don’t fail because they can’t raise money.
They fail because they don’t connect to real demand.

That sounds obvious — but a lot of the ecosystem is still optimized around funding rather than commercialization.

Sefa’s work is essentially about closing that gap.

Referenced

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of organizations, programs, and concepts that came up in the conversation:

• KOSGEB

• TÜBİTAK 1512 / 1812 (BİGG Program)

• TÜBİTAK TÜSSİDE

• Teknopark Istanbul

• TİM-TEB Girişim evi program

• Asya Ventures

• Startups Watch — upcoming TRVC episode with founder Serkan Ünsal

• Business Model Generation (Alexander Osterwalder)

• Startup’ların Başarı Kodları (Ahmet Sefa Bir)

Listen to the episode

The full episode (in Turkish) is now live on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. (English subtitles as well as an automatic dubbing to English are available on Youtube.)

If you:

• are raising a fund

• are investing in Türkiye

• or think there’s someone I should have on the podcast

just write a comment or find me on LinkedIn.

Or if you simply enjoyed the episode — feel free to say hi 👋

Thanks for being a part - in whichever way - of the Turkish entrepreneurial ecosystem.

This is also a small milestone: episode #25 of TRVC.
Across these first 25 episodes, the GPs I’ve hosted have collectively invested over $1B into Turkish startups. It’s been a front-row seat to how this ecosystem has evolved — and where it might be heading next.

💡 What we talked about with Gizem Yağız

• Why deep tech (and especially advanced materials) plays by a completely different VC playbook

• Why this area, largely overlooked by VC, is one of the biggest markets in the world

• How Türkiye’s industrial base is a competitive advantage for deep tech startups

• Why deep tech feels slow early on — and why that’s misleading

• The importance of pilot plants, scale-up, and commercial milestones

• Licensing vs building factories: different paths to scale

• Why strategic exits can be more attractive than IPOs in this space

• The role of non-dilutive funding (and why Europe is ahead here)

• Gaps in Türkiye’s deep tech ecosystem — and what’s needed to unlock it

• What kind of support deep tech founders actually need from investors

🔗 Referenced

• 212 NexT

• Akkök Holding

• Aksa Akrilik

• European Innovation Council

• Haelixa

• Aepnus

📚 Recommended

• The Four Agreements

• Stories That Stick

If you’re thinking about where Türkiye can really build an edge in technology — beyond software — this is a conversation worth your time.

As I look forward to the next 75 episodes to reach my 100 episode goal, I believe this podcast has started to establish a real resource of interviews with the investors that make up the Turkish VC ecosystem.

My goal is simple: map the ecosystem through the people building it.

If you’re a GP investing in or from Türkiye, an emerging manager, or raising a new fund — or if you know someone who should be on the podcast — please reach out. I’d love to hear from you.

Mustafa Keçeli is a senior leader at APY Ventures, one of Turkey’s most active venture capital platforms, operating under Albaraka Portföy. APY has built a broad portfolio across ~70+ startups and manages multiple venture funds (GSYFs), including both in-house and partner funds with institutions like Bilişim Vadisi and T3 Vakfı. In a market still early in its development, APY has become a key builder of Turkey’s VC infrastructure—combining institutional capital yet trying to apply a “think like a VC, not like a banker” mindset.

What we talked about

• Why VC cannot be run with a banking mindset—and what breaks if you try

• How APY scaled from 2 funds to 30+ and built a venture platform inside a bank

• The GSYF structure in Turkey, and how there is even a secondary shares market

• How they evaluate startups: team, market, and real-world traction

• Why Turkey produces strong technical talent but struggles with go-to-market

• The reality of exits in Turkey: why $20M–$50M exits matter more than unicorns

• Why APY sometimes chooses not to invest—even when capital is available

• The coming AI disruption and what founders are underestimating

Referenced

• APY Ventures — https://apy.ventures

• Albaraka Portföy — https://www.albarakaportfoy.com.tr

• Albaraka — https://www.albaraka.com.tr

• TaskRabbit — https://www.taskrabbit.com

• Armut — https://armut.com

• Betterment — https://www.betterment.com

• Robinhood — https://robinhood.com

• Flowla — https://flowla.com

• Scalex — https://www.scalexventures.com/ (+see my episode with Dilek Dayınlarlı)

• Botel (now Cendra) — https://cendra.ai

• Upsonic — https://upsonic.co

• Gardiyan — https://gardiyan.com

Ecosystem / institutions:

• Bilişim Vadisi — https://bilisimvadisi.com.tr

• KOSGEB — https://www.kosgeb.gov.tr

• OSTİM Teknopark — https://ostimteknopark.com.tr

• OSTİM Teknik Üniversitesi — https://www.ostimteknik.edu.tr

• T3 Vakfı — https://t3vakfi.org

• Ankara Teknopark — https://www.ankara-teknopark.com.tr

• Borsa İstanbul — https://www.borsaistanbul.com

• SPK — https://www.spk.gov.tr

Recommended

📚 Book

• An Edible History of Humanity (İnsanlığın Yeme Tarihi) — Tom Standage

🎧 Podcasts

• a16z Podcast — https://a16z.com/podcasts

If you’re trying to understand how venture capital actually works in an emerging market—and what it takes to build a real VC platform inside a regulated institution—this episode is a great place to start.

Full episode is in Turkish. Available on Youtube, Spotify, Apple podcasts

Since 2012, GBA has backed 60+ startups, including early investment in Insider.

But what stood out in our conversation wasn’t the amazing outcomes—it was the mechanism behind them.

Early-stage investing is not about access to deals.
It’s about access to founders.

And that access doesn’t come from brand or capital alone.

It comes from something much harder to systematize:
personal trust and direct engagement.

We get into:

• Why angel networks can outperform traditional VC structures at the earliest stages

• The limits of “platform” and “value-add” narratives

• How exits actually materialize (and why they’re rarely predictable)

• Why many startups struggle to move beyond their home market

• What LPs should really look for when evaluating early-stage exposure

If you’re allocating to venture—or thinking about it—this is a conversation worth listening to.

👉 Listen here: Youtube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts

TRVC – The Turkish VC Podcast
Conversations with the people shaping venture in Turkey

Over the past 15 years, a handful of programs, investors, and institutions quietly laid the groundwork for what is now a fast-growing venture ecosystem.

In the latest episode of TRVC – The Turkish VC Podcast, I sat down with Kenan Çolpan, partner at Boğaziçi Ventures, to trace that journey—from the early days of İTÜ ARI Teknokent and İTÜ Çekirdek, to today’s venture funds investing across the Turkish tech ecosystem.

Kenan was involved at several key moments in that story: helping build startup programs at ITÜ, becoming an early angel investor, and eventually co-founding Boğaziçi Ventures.

In our conversation, we discuss:

• How İTÜ Çekirdek and Big Bang helped catalyze the ecosystem
• The early years of angel investing and VC in Turkey
• How Boğaziçi Ventures built a multi-fund strategy (growth, AI, secondary, pre-IPO)
• Why Borsa İstanbul could become a meaningful exit path for tech companies
• What it will take for Turkey to produce more unicorns

More broadly, we talk about how ecosystems get built: the importance of capital, the role of universities, and why large domestic exits matter for the next generation of founders.

If you’re interested in startups, venture capital, or the future of Turkey’s technology economy, I think you’ll enjoy this episode.

Watch the episode:
Youtube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts

—
Yunus Çelebiler
Host, TRVC – The Turkish VC Podcast

In almost every episode of TRVC — the Turkish VC podcast, one theme keeps resurfacing:

Turkey doesn’t lack startups.
It doesn’t lack early-stage capital.
It lacks growth capital — funds that can write meaningful cheques and help companies scale beyond the early stages.

In this latest episode, I speak with İhsan Elgin, CEO of Finberg (the venture capital arm of Fibabanka) and Managing Partner at Oleka Capital — a platform built specifically to address that gap.

İhsan didn’t just observe the structural weakness in the ecosystem. He acted on it.

In our conversation, we explore:

• His journey from corporate executive at Koç Group to startup founder (with a U.S. exit)

• Launching one of Turkey’s earliest accelerator programs

• Building Finberg into a multi-fund investment platform

• Why DPI now matters more than TVPI in today’s venture environment

• The coming shakeout in VC funds

• Why Turkish founders must think regionally to unlock larger exits

• And how Oleka is using growth equity, SPVs, and venture debt to create a new model of growth financing

This is a thoughtful, strategic discussion about the evolution of venture capital in Turkey — less hype, more fundamentals.

If you’re a founder, investor, LP, or operator building in Turkey and the surrounding region, I believe you’ll find this episode particularly relevant.

You can watch on Youtube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts

As always, I welcome your feedback and reactions.

Best,
Yunus
TRVC – The Turkish VC Podcast

The first episode in 2026 of TRVC – The Turkish VC Podcast is now live, and I’m excited to share it with you. This episode is in Turkish — in the spirit of creating bridges between Turkish partners at VC firms outside of Turkey and the ecosystem in Türkiye.

In this episode, I speak with Zeynep Yavuz, Partner at General Catalyst, one of the world’s leading venture capital firms with over $43B under management. Zeynep is a Partner based in London, working with founders from seed stage all the way to IPO.

This was a wide-ranging and thoughtful conversation that goes beyond headlines and into how great companies are actually built.

Some of the topics we cover:

• What investors really look for at the seed stage — and why “why you’re building” matters more than “what you’re building”

• How General Catalyst partners with companies from seed to IPO under one platform

• Europe’s structural challenges around exits and IPOs

• Turkey’s gaming success and the role of “academy companies”

• New funding models beyond equity, including user acquisition financing

• One of the most important emerging trends: AI-driven transformation of service businesses

It’s a candid discussion about venture capital, entrepreneurship, and navigating uncertainty in a fast-changing world.

🎧 You can watch or listen to the episode on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts

As always, thank you for following TRVC. If you find the episode valuable, feel free to share it with others who might enjoy it as well.

Best,
Yunus