Tech Startups & Boutique Wineries
Last weekend we visited some boutique wineries at north east of Turkey (Trakya). After having wonderful conversations with winery owners, I realized the similarities with startups. Both start ups and boutique vineries are run by entrepreneurs who want to do something different or change the way others do the things. All work with passion and […]
Our investment in Mall IQ
We’re excited to announce our investment in Mall IQ. Founded by Batu and Ferit in 2015, Mall IQ provides precise location services to applications to understand their customer’s offline journey in shopping malls and high-streets, to engage them with relevant messages increasing foot traffic and sales. Successful marketing communications (emails, messages or even phone calls) […]
First Two Years
We are entering our 3rd year at 212. Here is a short overview of what we have been up to so far.
iyzico raises $13m in Series C round
We are pleased to announce iyzico raised USD13 million in a round led by Vostok Emerging Finance with participation from 212 Capital Partners and International Finance Corporation. Vostok Emerging Finance is a part of Vostok New Ventures with more than USD600 million of Net Asset Value and investments including BlaBlaCar, Gett and Delivery Hero. For […]
Number of investments doubling in Turkey comparing to previous two years
Turkish technological sector has been experiencing a major boom over the first half of the 2013. The number of Venture Funds, angel investors and number of investments are growing dramatically. The total amount of Venture Capital investment in Turkey was around $142M* in 2011. It decreased to $100M level in 2012 and has already passed […]
Trust — Respect — Transparency
At 212 we live by these three values and expect the same from our partners. Our job is to find out founders who live and build their businesses based with these values. Rest comes (actually “starts”) later… Launching a start-up is very easy; converting it to a business is very hard. It’s even harder to […]
Investment in Meddy
In 2016, Haris Aghadi graduated from Carnegie Mellon University Qatar with a bachelor’s degree in information systems. Instead of doing what his friends were doing at the time: getting a stable job in Doha with steady income, he decided to take an idea he developed for a class project to market and launched Meddy. I […]
Building deal-pipeline & some news
While we are meeting with potential LPs (Limited Partners) to raise 212VC fund, we are constantly adding startups to our deal-pipeline. So far it has been very encouraging to see quality entrepreneurs starting businesses in Turkey despite the global turbulence in the economy. Last week alone, we were introduced to six new startups. Building a […]
Startups, investments, & role of the government
Following decades of living in between Tokyo and New York and working at investment banks, I decided to move to Istanbul in 2010 to cultivate entrepreneurship and venture investments. The city, Turkey’s financial center, had started to emerge as a hub for tech startups, particularly in the e-commerce sector. Yet, there were no institutional investors […]
II before AI — Why Turkish Entrepreneurs need an ‘International Intelligence’
Ussal Sahbaz just published an interesting post — Why Turkey needs a National Artificial Intelligence Strategy. Ussal is a dear friend, CEO of EDAM, an Istanbul based independent think-tank, anyone interested in Turkey and startups should follow. On his post, he argues that against the AI giants of USA and China only a few small countries can […]