Inside Türkiye’s Startup Engine: From KOSGEB to In4Startups
Ahmet Sefa Bir (In4Startups and Asya Ventures) on TRVC episode 26
Last week on TRVC, I sat down with Ahmet Sefa Bir, founder of In4Startups — and someone who has spent the last 15+ years deep inside the machinery of Türkiye’s startup ecosystem.
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:
Startups Watch — upcoming TRVC episode with founder Serkan Ünsal
Business Model Generation (Alexander Osterwalder)
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
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Thanks for being a part - in whichever way - of the Turkish entrepreneurial ecosystem.