I had the opportunity to spend the last week in Istanbul, Turkey with Silicon Valley Abroad learning about the startup and technology ecosystem in the country. A country of ~80M people, a GDP per capita (nominal) of ~$10k, and ~56M internet users, Turkey is the world’s 18th largest consumer internet market. With the help of rising local entrepreneurs Ilker Elal, founder of Minorpreneurs, and Mert Zeybek & Kubilay Yilmaz, founders of Lorem Software, here’s a list of 5 tech startup success stories to come out of Turkey in the past decade that you should know about.
Trendyol: Founded in 2009, Trendyol is Turkey’s leading e-commerce company with over 16M customers received a ~$750M investment from Alibaba earlier this year to accelerate it’s growth, which likely makes it a unicorn company.