Startup in Turkey
Every startup record the directory holds in Turkey.
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Colendi
Fintech ecosystem providing AI-driven credit scoring, micro-credit, BNPL and investment services to consumers, plus B2B Banking-as-a-Service infrastructure for third parties.
Dream Games
Dream Games is an Istanbul-based mobile gaming studio founded in 2019 by five industry veterans from Peak Games and Zynga — Soner Aydemir, Ikbal Namli, Eren Shea, Hasan Yilmaz, and Serdar Yilmaz — who decided to bet the studio's entire future on shipping a single, highly polished casual puzzle title rather than the portfolio approach favored by most publishers. That title, Royal Match, launched in 2021 and became one of the highest-grossing mobile games in the world, reportedly generating in the billions of dollars in annual in-app revenue and holding steady top-5 grossing positions on both iOS and Android across multiple major markets. The studio raised over USD 450 million from Index Ventures, Makers Fund, Balderton, and others at valuations above USD 2.75 billion, making it one of the most valuable private gaming companies in Europe. Dream Games is the clearest contemporary example of Turkish mobile-gaming craft scaling into a global consumer business while staying headquartered in Istanbul.
Fimple
Cloud-native, API-first core banking platform offering Financial Functions as a Service, with composable lending, deposits, payments and treasury modules for banks and financial institutions.
Getir
Getir is an Istanbul-founded ultra-fast grocery and delivery platform that pioneered the 10-minute delivery model before it became a global phenomenon. Founded in 2015 by Nazim Salur, the company built a vertically integrated dark-store and courier network across Turkey before expanding to the UK, Germany, Netherlands, US, and other markets. At its peak Getir raised over $1.8 billion and reached a valuation above $11 billion, making it Turkey's most highly valued startup. The company later consolidated operations and refocused on profitable core markets, representing both the ambition and the operational challenges of the rapid delivery category in Europe.
Grand Games
Mobile gaming studio building hybrid-casual puzzle titles such as Magic Sort and Block Out, run via a multi-studio model. Surpassed 50M downloads across 200+ countries within two years.
Hepsiburada
Hepsiburada is one of Turkey's two largest e-commerce platforms, running a marketplace, first-party retail, express logistics, payments (HepsiPay), and advertising network serving tens of millions of monthly customers. Founded in 2000 by Hanzade Doğan Boyner, the company was the first major Turkish internet company to list on a US stock exchange when it IPO'd on Nasdaq (HEPS) in 2021 — a milestone that put Turkish consumer tech firmly on the radar of international public-market investors. Hepsiburada differentiates from Trendyol through its stronger positioning in 1P inventory, premium electronics, and its in-house payment infrastructure, and has built one of the largest same-day and next-day last-mile networks in the country. For the directory it is a key example of a Turkish consumer-internet story that reached public markets on its own, rather than through strategic acquisition.
Insider
Insider is an Istanbul-founded marketing technology platform that uses AI to help brands deliver personalized, cross-channel customer experiences across web, mobile, email, messaging, and advertising touchpoints. The platform unifies customer data, predicts behavior, and automates individualized content delivery at scale. Insider has raised over $270 million, achieved unicorn status, and serves over 1,200 enterprise customers including Samsung, IKEA, and Estee Lauder across 28 countries. Co-founded in 2012 by Hande Cilingir, Insider is one of Turkey's most prominent B2B technology exports and a rare example of a martech unicorn built outside of Silicon Valley.
iyzico
iyzico is an Istanbul-founded payment processor and merchant-acquiring platform that became Turkey's most visible fintech exit when it was acquired by Naspers-owned PayU in 2019 for around USD 165 million, at the time one of the largest fintech deals in Turkish history. Founded in 2013 by Barbaros Özbugutu and Tahsin Isin, iyzico built a developer-friendly API stack for accepting card payments, recurring billing, marketplace split payments, and fraud detection in the Turkish market, and layered a 'buy now, pay later' product on top that became a default installment option for thousands of Turkish e-commerce merchants. Even inside PayU, iyzico continues to operate as the Turkish merchant payments brand and has expanded into additional financial services, making it a canonical reference for how a CEE/MENA fintech can convert a tough local regulatory environment into a defensible commercial wedge.
Peak Games
Peak Games was an Istanbul-based mobile gaming company that built globally successful casual puzzle games including Toon Blast and Toy Blast, which attracted hundreds of millions of downloads. The company was acquired by Zynga in 2020 for $1.8 billion, marking one of the largest exits in Turkish and European gaming history. Founded in 2010 by Sidar Sahin, Peak Games demonstrated that world-class mobile gaming studios could emerge from Turkey, and its success helped catalyze a wave of gaming entrepreneurship in Istanbul. The acquisition validated the depth of Turkish mobile gaming talent and design expertise on the global stage.
Picus Security
Picus Security is an Ankara-founded cybersecurity company that built one of the earliest commercial breach-and-attack simulation (BAS) platforms — software that continuously runs safe, controlled attack techniques against an enterprise's production environment to see which ones are actually detected and blocked by the deployed security stack. Instead of trusting vendor claims, security teams get a measured, MITRE ATT&CK-mapped view of where their SIEM, EDR, firewalls, and email gateways are silently failing. Founded in 2013 by Alper Memiş and Volkan Ertürk, Picus has raised over USD 80 million from Turkvent, Earlybird, and Mastercard Ventures among others, and is regularly named a leader in Gartner's security validation and exposure management categories. It is one of the most internationally credible Turkish cybersecurity companies and a strong example of the region's deep-tech security talent.
Sipay
Payments and embedded finance platform offering payment processing, digital wallets, prepaid cards and FX for merchants and consumers across emerging markets. Serves 6.3M users and 25,000 merchants.
Spyke Games
Spyke Games is an Istanbul-based mobile gaming studio that raised one of the largest seed rounds in European gaming history — roughly USD 55 million in 2022, led by Griffin Gaming Partners, Index Ventures, and Makers Fund — on the strength of its founding team's track record in casual and social gaming. The studio focuses on multiplayer social casual titles with deep live-ops loops and player-to-player interaction as a retention driver, and is part of the generation of second-wave Turkish mobile studios (alongside Dream Games and Spyke Labs alumni) trying to turn the country's engineering depth and low-cost production into a durable mobile entertainment cluster. For the directory, Spyke represents the next chapter of Turkish mobile gaming following the Peak Games / Zynga exit, and a data point on how extensively Turkish founders have now captured international venture appetite for casual gaming.
Tarfin
Tarfin (Tarfin Tarim A.S.) is an Istanbul-headquartered agrifintech company that helps farmers buy fertilizers, seeds, feed, equipment and fuel from authorised retailers and pay at harvest time using machine learning-based risk assessment. Its Tarfin Mobil app lets farmers compare local input prices, submit purchase applications typically evaluated within minutes, and track payments due at harvest. The company serves more than 65,000 farmers through 1,500+ authorised retailers across 75+ cities in Turkey, and also operates in Romania. It separately runs Tarfin Flex, a consumer buy-now-pay-later product.
Trendyol
Trendyol is Turkey's largest e-commerce platform, operating a marketplace, express delivery service, digital wallet, and food delivery product that together serve tens of millions of customers. Founded in 2010 by Demet Mutlu, the company attracted a major investment from Alibaba Group and has grown into one of the most valuable private technology companies in Europe with a valuation exceeding $16 billion. Trendyol processes millions of orders daily through its logistics infrastructure spanning hundreds of thousands of merchants. The platform is a dominant force in Turkish digital commerce and an increasingly important player in cross-border e-commerce across the broader region.
UserGuiding
No-code product adoption platform for building in-app onboarding flows, tooltips, walkthroughs, knowledge bases and surveys to reduce churn. Founded 2017; clients include Uber and UNICEF.
Vispera
Image-recognition and AI platform for retail and CPG companies, automating shelf monitoring, planogram compliance, price tracking and competitive intelligence from in-store imagery.
