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MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA • INNOVATION
EBRD Star Venture
AUGUST 3, 2026
Turkey's first wave of technology companies built for a person holding a phone. The seven companies in the EBRD Star Ventures Türkiye cohort build for a different customer: airlines, factory operators, farmers, and corporate sustainability teams. The problems are harder to explain and slower to win, and much harder for a rival to copy.
Turkey's first wave of technology companies built for a person holding a phone. Trendyol became one of the country's most valuable companies. Getir made same-hour delivery a habit, and Hepsiburada put a marketplace in millions of pockets.
The seven companies in the EBRD Star Ventures Türkiye cohort build for a different customer: airlines, factory operators, farmers, and corporate sustainability teams. The problems are harder to explain and slower to win, and much harder for a rival to copy.
Most of these founders started from a research problem rather than a market gap. Two of them, Uptechlabs and AI SOFT, share one backer: Sabancı ARF, an innovation and commercialisation fund. More of this generation is coming out of research labs than app stores. Around them, the EBRD funds the programme, local country offices handle introductions on the ground, and Seedstars runs the curriculum, the governance work, and the investor meetings.
Ayşe Naz Erer co-founded Atarev and runs it as chief executive. It helps airlines price seats in real time, reading competitor fares, demand, and the impact of events to adjust each flight. With seventeen people and partners across four continents, it is one of the more established companies in the cohort.
Kerem Özsu built Event Gates to put computer vision on the factory floor. Its cameras watch cranes, robotic cells, and production lines, stopping a machine before an accident and catching defects a human inspector misses. It is the quiet outlier of the group: self-funded, profitable for three years, selling to European carmakers, and opening an arm in Germany.
Ufuk Peker's Arya-AI runs a team of AI agents that take on the back-office work that slows companies down, across finance, supply chain, and operations. Clients report average productivity gains of 82 percent. For a time it was the first women-led company in its category in the MENA region.
At Uptechlabs, Mert Kalaycı builds lighting that shortens a plant's growth cycle from 95 days to 35, on 97 percent less water and a fraction of the energy of conventional farming. The systems run in vertical farms, commercial greenhouses, and a unit small enough for a kitchen.
Özgün İnceoğlu founded MAP360 to handle the part of sustainability work most software skips: carbon accounting, supply-chain data, and regulatory reporting against standards like CSRD, GRI, and CDP. Its team came out of sustainability consulting, so it handles the detail generic tools miss. It has grown without outside investment.
Ahmet Ozan Çelik runs EVbee, which sends mobile charging vans to electric cars instead of waiting for fixed chargers to arrive. Its first market is insurance and roadside assistance, where a flat battery is a callout like any other. Çelik started the company in 2024 and funded it through a public raise.
Esin and Cemal Yılmaz built Text2Test, which lets non-technical teams write automated software tests in plain language. The tests repair themselves as the code changes. They target an industry that can spend most of a project's budget on testing, and the Arya women's fund backs them.
These seven share a posture more than a sector. They build for a buyer with a specific, expensive problem, and they sell beyond Turkey from the start. The country has shown it can make technology the world uses.
