The Factory Built a Venture Lab - Then the Venture Lab Learned to Build Companies

The usual startup accelerator begins with a cohort and ends with applause. Fark Labs begins somewhere less photogenic: inside the R&D operation of Farplas, a Turkish automotive supplier accustomed to tooling, deadlines and customers who expect the thing to work. That ancestry matters. It gives this Istanbul company a sharper question than “Is the idea exciting?” The question is whether an idea can cross the long, awkward distance from presentation slide to production line.

Founded in 2018 by Ahu Büyükkuşoğlu Serter, Fark Labs has grown into a hybrid that resists the usual labels. It incubates founders, runs accelerators, designs innovation programs for corporations, operates a government-designated technology development center, helps companies enter the United States and invests directly. Its dedicated venture arm, F+ Ventures, reaches into late seed and Series A. The public portfolio lists 36 companies. They include autonomous-driving software, electric-vehicle charging, route optimization, water conservation, molecular diagnostics, surgical training models and vertical farms.

On paper, that can look like a crowded menu. In practice, the menu is the thesis: a startup rarely needs only one thing. Capital without a customer can become expensive waiting. A corporate introduction without technical readiness becomes a polite meeting. A demo day without a route to the next market becomes a photograph. Fark Labs tries to keep those pieces in one pipeline.

The product is the handoff

Fark Labs calls its founder journey the Better Future Path. The route starts with idea development, team formation and a business plan, then moves through prototyping, grants, investor-deck work and audience research. Later stages add corporate matching, proof-of-concept projects, pre-seed investment, sales readiness, publicity and introductions to investors. None of those services is novel alone. The design choice is to make each stage hand work to the next.

Its programs reveal how that machinery changes shape by market. Think BiGGER links entrepreneurs to training and the opportunity to seek 450,000 Turkish lira of TÜBİTAK-backed investment support. A six-week accelerator built with software company Softtech focused on the business, technology and financing needs of AI startups. Innomotion, organized with EIT Urban Mobility and Sabancı University, uses industry, research and cities as the proving ground for transport ideas.

That last program has the best public yardstick. From its 2020 launch through 2024, Innomotion evaluated more than 150 urban-mobility startups and selected 57. This was not mobility as a buzzword. A 2021 workshop at the Istanbul office gathered 48 people from municipalities, universities, government, companies, nonprofits and startups. They worked on seven recognizable city headaches, from last-mile logistics and public transport to traffic flow and transfers between modes.

“Fark Labs was the birthplace of DUCKT, where we as the co-founders first met.”Çağrı Selçuklu, DUCKT co-founder and CEO

Its best case study rolled out the door

DUCKT, a provider of docking and charging infrastructure for scooters and bikes, began inside Fark Labs and spun out in 2020. Selçuklu’s account is revealing because he does not praise a classroom. He remembers finding co-founders, specialists, early customers and venture connections in the same place. That is the industrial-hub advantage in miniature: reduce the number of cold doors a new company must knock on.

The same pattern appears in the wider portfolio. Optiyol uses optimization and machine learning to plan urban deliveries. Fark Labs invested in 2021, and an Innomotion scale-up program later helped the company secure EIT Urban Mobility backing for European expansion. In 2025, Fark Labs managed a $4 million round for Saykal Electronics, whose radar sensors and power electronics belong squarely in the world of demanding industrial buyers. The syndicate included a renewable-energy technology fund, Fark Holding, APY Ventures, Anadolu Isuzu and other investors.

Those examples explain the customer base. Founders use Fark Labs for capital, technical mentoring, pilot opportunities and market entry. Corporations use it to scout young companies and run custom innovation programs without building the entire apparatus themselves. Investors use its co-investor program to access ventures Fark Labs says it has vetted and intends to back. Cities, universities and public agencies use it as an organizer capable of translating between groups that share a problem but not a vocabulary.

Four shelves, one curiosity cabinet

The investment map has four shelves. Mobility is the inheritance: charging, autonomy, sensing, logistics and the infrastructure around them. Life sciences covers diagnostics, biotech and health platforms. Sustainable lifestyle stretches from water and food waste to materials and agriculture. The final shelf is deliberately named the “curiosity cabinet,” a home for emerging technologies that refuse the other labels.

The counts overlap because some companies sit on more than one shelf. That is not a bookkeeping flaw so much as an admission that real products misbehave around categories. A decontamination system can be both mobility and life sciences. An education-finance product can belong to sustainable living and emerging tech. The portfolio is less a collection of fashionable sectors than a map of industries under pressure to electrify, automate, conserve or personalize.

Competitors occupy individual parts of this map. Turkish accelerators such as İTÜ Çekirdek, Workup and Hackquarters run founder programs. Bilişim Vadisi offers a national technology ecosystem. Corporate venture firms such as Driventure bring sector access. Traditional funds bring capital. Fark Labs’ distinction is the bundle, strengthened by the Farplas manufacturing lineage and formal roles inside European and Turkish innovation networks.

The bundle also explains how the business can make money without behaving like a fund alone. Corporations pay for custom innovation and access to a filtered startup pipeline. Founders can buy curated market-entry programs, such as the company’s CES package. TEKMER adds office and R&D-center services. Public and institutional partnerships support ecosystem programs. Equity supplies a slower, riskier return if a portfolio company grows. The mix trades simplicity for staying power: consulting can fund work now while investments take years to mature.

The factory did not disappear

Fark Labs’ evolution reads less like a sudden pivot than an expanding mandate. What began as automotive R&D became a group-wide innovation platform, then added a technopark hub in Ankara, accelerator credentials, a venture portfolio and foreign-market bridges. Michigan now serves as a landing point for startups looking for American customers, investors and partnerships. Seoul anchors another edge of the network. The company did not reject its industrial origin. It made that origin useful to people outside the parent company.

The culture tries to match the structure. Fark Labs describes itself as “colorful, incomplete, fluid,” then lists six values: people, persistence, purpose, progress, passion and planet. Sister organization Arya focuses on women-led investment, and Fark Labs states that it works to increase the number of women-led companies in its portfolio. The office even has a feline Chief Curiosity Officer named Mila, a joke that lands because “curiosity” already has a job in the investment thesis.

There is a copyable lesson here for corporations with underused R&D knowledge. Do not begin with a theater of beanbags and pitch nights. Start with a real problem owner, a technical expert, a budget for a pilot and a person empowered to buy. Let founders meet all four. Preserve a path to capital if the pilot works, and a graceful exit if it does not. Then connect the same startup to a second market before the first becomes its ceiling.

The conditions matter. This model favors startups whose products benefit from industrial validation, regulated-market navigation or enterprise distribution. It is less naturally suited to a pure consumer app that wins through celebrity, viral loops or millions of tiny transactions. It also depends on corporate partners acting quickly enough for startup time. A six-month procurement queue can eat the very company an accelerator hopes to help.

The first thing to fail is often the handoff, not the invention. A founder can leave mentorship with a sharper deck and still lack a buyer; a corporation can run a pilot and still lack an internal owner willing to scale it. Fark Labs’ answer has been to widen the chain rather than choose one link. Its 2025 industrial program with EIT Manufacturing South East led into plans for a Future Industries Fund with Azimut Portföy. In the same year, its role in Saykal’s round moved from ecosystem organizer to transaction manager. The evidence suggests a mind changed by repetition: demo days are useful, but follow-through needs someone responsible for the next check, contract or border crossing.

Fark Labs sits in the uncomfortable middle between the old economy and whatever replaces it. That middle is crowded with translation work: engineer to investor, municipality to founder, Istanbul to Michigan, prototype to purchase order. It is not glamorous work, which may be why it is valuable. Ideas are plentiful. Handoffs are where they break.