Insider: the Turkish software company that is not a game studio

Ask anyone outside Türkiye what the country's software industry produces and the answer is puzzle games. That reputation is earned and it is also incomplete, because the largest software company to come out of Türkiye in the last decade sells enterprise marketing tools to global brands.

What Insider did

Insider was founded in Istanbul and sells marketing software to large companies internationally. In March 2022 it closed a $121 million Series D led by the Qatar Investment Authority, with Sequoia, Riverwood Capital, 212, Wamda, Esas Private Equity and Endeavor Catalyst joining, at a $1.22 billion valuation.

That made it the first company founded by a woman in Türkiye or the wider region to reach unicorn status, with co-founder Hande Cilingir leading it there.

A further $105 million followed in 2023, again led by the Qatar Investment Authority alongside Esas, bringing total funding to $274 million.

The detail worth sitting with is who wrote the cheques. A sovereign wealth fund and a top-tier Silicon Valley firm underwriting a Turkish enterprise software company is a different signal from a games studio being bought by a games publisher. It says the market is capable of producing companies that sell to the Fortune 500.

Why the B2B playbook looks different

A games company and a B2B software company both export software from Türkiye, and almost nothing else about them is alike.

A studio finds users by buying them. Spending scales up on the day a game works and stops on the day it does not, the feedback arrives within hours, and the main skill is reading numbers quickly.

A B2B company finds customers by convincing them. The cycle runs for months, the buyer wants attestations and references before legal will approve anything, and one signature can be worth more than a year of consumer revenue. The main skill is a small number of experienced people doing patient work.

That difference decides which parts of the incentive programme are worth anything to you.

The items that matter for B2B

For a games studio the programme is dominated by advertising and store commissions. For a B2B company those are close to irrelevant, and three other items carry the weight.

Salary support, Article 19, reimburses half the gross pay of staff hired for international sales, business development and marketing, up to 90,000 TL of support per person per month for five people in Türkiye and up to 250,000 TL for five more in an overseas office, each for five years. For a company whose entire go-to-market is people, this is the item that changes the economics.

Certification, Article 7, covers certificates, accreditations and audits obtained for overseas markets at 50%, up to 4,000,000 TL a year. Enterprise buyers do not sign without them, they have to be maintained rather than obtained once, and different markets want different ones.

Events, Article 13, covers stand costs, space, freight and travel for two representatives at overseas events, at 50% up to 1,500,000 TL per event and double that for events the Ministry classes as prestigious. B2B software is still sold at conferences.

Market research subscriptions, international memberships and software licences fill in around those.

A worked year for a B2B company

Take a Turkish software company selling into Europe and North America, with a commercial team of four and the usual compliance burden:

• $420,000 on three business development and marketing hires in Istanbul
• $160,000 on certifications, audits and annual renewals across three frameworks
• $130,000 on two overseas conferences with stands
• $90,000 on hosting for the customer-facing platform
• $55,000 on analyst subscriptions and industry memberships

The three commercial hires return about $68,000, because the per-person monthly ceiling binds before half the salary does at senior levels. Certifications return $80,000, comfortably inside the annual cap. The two conferences return about $63,000 once the per-event cap applies. Hosting returns $45,000, and the subscriptions and memberships $27,500.

That is roughly $283,000 back on $855,000 of spending, against costs the company was committed to regardless. No advertising, no store commissions, no user acquisition anywhere in it.

The reason to run the numbers this way is that a B2B founder scanning the headline caps sees figures built for a consumer business and assumes none of it applies. The items are simply drawn from a different part of the same programme.

Why the headline numbers understate it

The figures that get quoted about this programme, the 50 million TL advertising cap and the 70% target country rate, belong to a consumer business. A B2B founder reads them, concludes the programme is built for games, and stops.

That is the wrong conclusion drawn from the right numbers. The eligibility article covers commercial software alongside digital games without distinction, and the items are defined by what the spending does rather than by what you sell. A B2B company simply draws from a different set of them.

Run the arithmetic on the items above and a company with three commercial hires, a few certifications and two conferences a year is recovering a substantial share of its entire go-to-market cost. It is a less dramatic number than a studio's advertising rebate and a larger share of what the business actually spends.

What it means for the market

Insider matters here for the same reason Peak does, and for a different audience.

Peak proved that a Turkish company could build a consumer product for the world. Insider proved that a Turkish company could sell enterprise software to the world, get underwritten by international institutional capital, and be led there by a founder who did not fit anyone's template.

For a foreign B2B software company weighing Türkiye, that second proof is the relevant one. It means the local market understands enterprise sales, that people with that experience exist to hire, and that investors have seen it work before.

The studios that came out of one city get the attention. The software companies selling to businesses are quieter, larger in aggregate, and better served by the incentive programme than most of them realise.

The calculator covers the salary, certification and event items alongside the rest.