Startup Landscape in Turkiye
Everyone heard about the “peaks” of Turkish tech companies but those were unique-corns. The anomalies that doesn’t represent us. The media mislead people with only showing the great successes all the time.
This is a fun project. Made to reveal the actual market. It turns out the overall scene is completely different than what media likes to focus. Far smaller and sprouting at depths. The organic market is far below the surface. Forming bell-curves piled around more humble numbers.
Presenting the Turkish tech startup landscape with its depths, its gaps and what it may deliver in near future by the numbers.
Here is the list of key takeaways that’ll wipe away the media brainwash:
- Turkiye lacks late stage investment culture.
- Early is only slighly more populated than the late.
- Both early & late are mainly supported by foreign investors.
- Acquisition deal sizes are smaller than the late.
- Popular seed stake is moving down from %10.
- The deal sizes multiply beyond 10x to early and to late.
Motivation
- Avoiding media for startup news.
- Retain visualization skills.
Notes on the work
- Covers [ 2020 Q1, 2024 Q4 ].
- Excludes deals with undisclosed details.
- Based on 212 and KPMG Turkish Startup Investment Reviews.
- Work in progress. Iterating over presentation.
- Codebase is ufukty/landscape.
- Report data-claim disconnect.
Acclamations
Thanks 212 for allowing me to share my visualizations derived from their reports.
Reading charts
- Stages are colored as:
- Earlier years are faded.
- Shades differ in dark and light mode.
- Histograms create and hide hills.
- Best on wide screen.
- Money is in USD nominal and log-plotted with bins in $10K*log2(n).
Bandwidths
Nice to see, despite seriously long overlapping regions with high number of deals, deal sizes increase to 15x to early and 18x to late in average.
# of deals by (years, range, stage)
Histogram shows that the 2024 was worse than previous for seed investments if we don’t count TÜBİTAK investments.
Invested $ by (years, stage)
2023 was the second highest year for seed investment in the last 5 year despite the decline of total investment.
Invested $ by (years, range, stage)
Switch between stages and observe the ranges forming bell curves. Breakdowns suggest the seed market is mainly in between $200K—$10M.
Stakes
The “popular” stake range was %5-%10 until very recently. In the 2024 it became 0%-5%. The change factor is 100+ TÜBİTAK BİGG investments made within just one year.
Lowering seed stakes
Low stakes in early stages leaves plenty room for later stages.
Seems like TÜBİTAK also knows that they kept average stake at 3%. Combined with the number of deals its impact on the scene become crystal clear.
Nice to see that only the 2 out of 13 investments asking 30% or more stake in a seed stage are done in 2024. Highest seed stake is 76%.
Cite
Yıldırım, Ufuktan. “Startup Landscape of Turkiye.” Things & Thoughts. Last modified November 28, 2025. https://ufukty.com/articles/landscape
Page history is accessible on GitHub.