Ottoman Ventures is connective tissue — enabler, advisor, media platform — for US capital looking at Turkey's tech ecosystem. We don't deploy a fund. We make the cross-border work.
Most firms in this space pick a lane. Some run funds. Some run consultancies. Some run media. We do three things on purpose, because each one feeds the other two — and because cross-border venture into Turkey doesn't work if any of them are missing.
Signal — we publish a real, source-cited read on Turkey's tech ecosystem. This is the top of our funnel. It's also how we keep the substance of our thinking sharper than the conventional take.
Access — we maintain relationships with Turkey-Nexus founders that take a flight to build. When US investors want a curated introduction, they go through us because we've already done the filtering.
Execution — we structure cross-border deals where the right answer involves three jurisdictions and a clear path to exit. Diligence, structuring, regulatory navigation, post-investment support. The unglamorous middle of a deal.
We are not a fund. We don't take LP commitments, we don't deploy our own capital at scale, and we don't have a portfolio in the traditional sense. We're paid for outcomes — for closed introductions, advisory engagements, and quarterly intelligence subscriptions. That's by design. It keeps us aligned with the investor, not with our own deployment schedule.
Our engagements include success-based components on closed deals and delivered advisory outputs. We won't get rich on retainers alone. That keeps us selective on who we bring you and ruthless on the diligence we run before we do.
Numbers come with citations. Claims about deal terms come from public filings or from founders we've spoken with directly. When we don't know, we say so. The first time an LP catches us with an invented stat is the last time we get the meeting.
Lira volatility, geopolitical exposure, capital repatriation — these are real, and pretending otherwise costs us credibility. Our diligence work and our public writing both lead with the risks before the upside. The LPs who take us seriously appreciate it.
Turkey produces a lot of fundable companies. It produces fewer that survive a 5-year hold under our risk lens. We see hundreds of decks a year. We surface a handful. If we wouldn't put our own capital next to yours in a deal, we won't introduce it.
Ottoman Ventures was founded in 2011, when Turkey's tech ecosystem produced exactly zero unicorns and the phrase "Turkey-Nexus" wasn't yet a category. We started with a small thesis — that Turkish founders building globally relevant companies needed a connective tissue to US capital that didn't exist.
Fifteen years later, the ecosystem we anticipated has materialized. Peak Games, Trendyol, Getir, Dream Games, Hepsiburada, Insider — the unicorn cohort that didn't exist when we started is now a cohort. The 2024 mega-deals ($2.6B in total transaction volume) were the proof that the question shifted from "will Turkey produce world-class tech companies?" to "how do US investors get in early?"
Our vintage isn't a track record claim. It's a network claim. We've watched the founders who matter come up through the stack. We've watched the funds that emerged (212, Revo, Boğaziçi, APY, Diffusion) build out. We've watched the regulatory landscape evolve. The relationships compound. The pattern recognition compounds. That's what we sell.
We brief US investors quarterly on TR deal flow and sector dynamics. No deck. Just the read.
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