Raising capital in Türkiye: the funds, the programmes and what they have backed

Founders looking at Türkiye ask about tax and incentives first and funding second, usually with an unspoken assumption that the answer will be thin. It is a reasonable thing to check. A country with no capital is a hard place to build past a certain size, whatever the tax treatment.

The answer is better than most people expect, and the evidence is in what has actually been funded rather than in how many funds exist.

Who writes the cheques

An institutional layer has built up here over roughly the last decade.

212 was the country's first institutional venture fund and remains among the most active, investing across the region. Revo Capital runs from seed through Series B and is one of the more prolific local leads. Earlybird Digital East, the regional arm of a large European firm, has been investing in Turkish companies for years and was an early backer of several of the largest outcomes. ScaleX Ventures focuses on early-stage companies with global ambitions, weighted towards software, AI and deep tech.

Around them sit Collective Spark, Logo Ventures, Diffusion Capital Partners and a widening group of newer managers, plus corporate venture arms attached to the banks and telecoms operators.

By total capital invested, Türkiye is among the largest venture markets in its wider region, second to Saudi Arabia on the figures ScaleX publishes in its ecosystem overview.

The international funds are already here

This is the part that changes the picture, and it is documented rather than anecdotal.

Dream Games raised a $255 million round in 2022 led by Index Ventures at a $2.75 billion valuation, with Balderton and Sequoia participating. In the deal that followed, CVC became the company's sole equity partner in a transaction valuing it at close to $5 billion, with CVC and Blackstone committing more than $2 billion between them and Blackstone providing debt financing. The early venture backers, including Balderton, Makers Fund, Index and IVP, took liquidity after more than five years, and the five founders remained majority shareholders.

Insider closed a $121 million Series D in March 2022 led by the Qatar Investment Authority, with Sequoia, Riverwood Capital, 212, Wamda, Esas Private Equity and Endeavor Catalyst participating, at a $1.22 billion valuation. That made it the first woman-founded company in Türkiye and the wider region to reach unicorn status. A further $105 million followed in 2023, again led by QIA with Esas, at close to a $2 billion valuation and taking total funding to $274 million.

Peak was acquired outright by Zynga for $1.8 billion in 2020, half cash and half stock, which remains the reference point for what a Turkish studio can be worth.

Those are not companies that had to leave to get funded. They raised from the biggest names in the industry while headquartered in Istanbul.

The accelerator and incubator layer

The early-stage infrastructure is mostly attached to universities and banks, and it is denser than the fund layer.

İTÜ Çekirdek, run out of İTÜ ARI Teknokent, has been operating since 2012 and is the best known of the university incubators, with a large alumni network across the Istanbul software scene. KWORKS at Koç University runs acceleration and incubation programmes on a similar model. Workup, backed by one of the large banks, and the programmes attached to the telecoms operators cover the same ground from the corporate side.

Endeavor Türkiye sits apart from these. It is not an accelerator but a selection network for companies that are already scaling, and its Turkish chapter has been unusually influential in connecting founders here to international investors. TÜBİTAK runs national grant programmes for early-stage technology companies, which are a separate track from venture money entirely.

For an established foreign company relocating here, none of these are a funding route. Their value is the network, and specifically the flow of people through them, which is a hiring advantage rather than a capital one.

The part founders overlook

One argument rarely makes it into these conversations, and it belongs in every one of them.

A company operating from Türkiye gets 50% of its overseas growth spending back in cash, rising to 70% for activity aimed at the Ministry's target countries. That covers advertising, hosting, store and platform commissions, certification, events and a share of commercial payroll.

For a studio spending $2 million a year acquiring users, that is somewhere between $1 million and $1.4 million returning to the company. Raised as equity at an early-stage valuation, a million dollars is expensive. Collected as a reimbursement against spending you were making anyway, it costs nothing but the discipline of filing on time.

That does not replace venture capital for a company that needs to move fast. What it does is change the size of the round. A growth plan that needed $4 million of outside money needs meaningfully less when a large share of the spend comes back, and the founders keep the difference in equity rather than in cash.

Investors read it the same way. A company that collects its incentives systematically is showing a capital efficiency that is hard to argue with, and it is one of the few operational details that improves a story rather than complicating it.

Where the money has actually gone

The funding here is concentrated rather than spread evenly, and knowing the shape of it tells you how easy your own raise is likely to be.

Games is the deepest pool by a distance. It has produced the largest outcomes, it is where the international specialist funds look first, and there are investors who understand mobile unit economics without needing them explained.

B2B software is the second cluster, and Insider's trajectory did a lot to establish that a Turkish company can sell enterprise software globally at scale.

Fintech and marketplaces attract substantial domestic capital, driven partly by the size of the local market, which makes them a slightly different proposition from an export-first software company.

Outside those, the local investor base thins out, and companies in less familiar categories tend to find their lead investor abroad. That is not a barrier so much as a longer process, and it argues for building enough revenue history to raise on numbers rather than on category familiarity.

What this means if you are deciding

Türkiye is not a place where you build to a certain size and then have to leave to raise money. The record says otherwise, repeatedly and at scale.

What it is, more usefully, is a place where the same growth plan needs less capital, because a large share of the spending comes back and the tax on exported software income is favourable. That combination is worth more to a founder than access to any particular fund.

The structuring questions, where the holding company sits and how a future round or sale is handled, are worth settling early rather than during a raise. What happens when someone buys your studio covers the exit side, and the calculator puts a number on the non-dilutive half of the equation.