Hande Cilingir Took the Long Way to Silicon Valley

The first company began with a newspaper clipping. In Fethiye, a resort town on Turkey's southwestern coast, thousands of British families had settled into retirement. Hande Cilingir and her university friend Serhat Soyuerel saw a peculiar abundance: native English speakers with time, in a beautiful place where international students might happily spend a summer. They built English & More around the conjunction. Students would study, stay with British host families and treat the Mediterranean as part of the syllabus.

The first season brought only a few students. A Turkish beach town was a difficult answer to a question usually answered with London or Malta. So the founders changed the sales pitch into a field trip. They invited education agents to Fethiye, put them in the same host homes and let the place make its own case. Cilingir later recalled 1,500 students in the first successful year and 3,000 from 28 countries in the second. The venture was sold. More important, it left her with an education in marketing: people do not experience a company as an organizational chart. They experience a sequence of small promises, kept or broken.

The electrician's daughter learns the map

Cilingir grew up in Bursa, the daughter of a housewife and an electrician who had worked on ships. She remembers her father after retirement, riding a bicycle to repair jobs through rain, snow and late evenings. He worked until he was 68. The detail she carries is less about hardship than temperament: he did not complain. In her telling, the founder's favored verbs - work, change, achieve - entered the family grammar before they entered a pitch deck.

At the London School of Economics, where she studied economics and management, she tried corporate work with companies including Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. The scale was impressive; the distance between effort and effect bothered her. Decisions took time. Responsibility arrived carefully rationed. During those years she also built social networks for Turkish universities, before social networking became an ordinary campus utility, and started BilgiAid, an education project recognized by Junior Chamber International in Turkey.

Then she went to Shanghai. Cilingir studied Chinese language and culture at Shanghai Normal University, learned Mandarin and worked in China. Her reason was practical: to conduct business in a country, learn the culture and the language. It sounds obvious until one counts how many global strategies are written without either. Soyuerel was working in Moscow. After several years abroad, they returned to Turkey at the same time to try the idea that became English & More.

Six founders and one room

After the education company was acquired, the founders considered e-commerce. Cilingir wanted a business with more technical leverage and greater value for Turkey. The irritation she had felt while marketing the school offered a direction: brands possessed growing piles of customer data, yet their tools delivered disconnected messages across disconnected channels. In 2012, she, Soyuerel, Mehmet Sinan Toktay, Arda Koterin, Muharrem Derinkok and Okan Yedibela started Insider.

There were six desks in a single-room home office. Roughly a year went into research and development before a product emerged. The early platform used predictive models to help marketers identify audiences and personalize what people saw on websites and mobile devices. The proposition would broaden over time into a customer-data and engagement platform spanning email, web, apps, messaging and other channels. The founding problem remained legible: make an individual customer's journey feel like one journey.

Insider's geographic sequence broke with the familiar software itinerary. The company started its international work through London and Warsaw, moved aggressively across Asia-Pacific, then pushed deeper into Europe, Latin America and North America. Cilingir has described local teams and cultural fluency as necessary infrastructure. A playbook that works in Warsaw can fail in Jakarta for reasons no dashboard explains. The company had to become local repeatedly.

Money followed in measured steps: $2.2 million in 2016, $11 million led by Sequoia India in 2018, and $32 million led by Riverwood Capital in 2020. Qatar Investment Authority led a $121 million Series D in 2022 at a $1.22 billion valuation. Two years later, General Atlantic led a $500 million Series E. Insider One says its total funding has reached $775 million.

The relationships around that staircase mattered. Cilingir has singled out Fadi Ghandour, the Aramex founder and Wamda Capital executive chairman, as a longtime mentor and friend. Endeavor selected her as an entrepreneur in 2014, then named her among its Outlier Entrepreneurs in 2025. The network gave her access to founders who had already met the awkward problems that begin after a startup's first success: whom to hire, when to open a country and how to keep a coherent culture while the office map multiplies. Global expansion can resemble a triumph in retrospect. During the work, it is a collection of leases, payroll rules, misread signals and meetings held at disagreeable hours.

One public milestone pleased her for a private reason. When Nasdaq displayed Insider's team across its Times Square screens, Cilingir remembered the faces rather than the logo. She called seeing the team above New York a special moment for her and her co-founders, and credited their work for the company's position. The scene contained a tidy reversal: a group that had begun around six desks in Turkey now occupied a towering billboard in American capitalism's favorite square. Yet the image she treasured was collective. For a chief executive whose name inevitably sits at the top of profiles like this one, she regularly redirects the lens toward the people who built beside her.

The numbers behind the culture

Founders routinely call their companies families, which can be a charming way to request work at midnight. Cilingir's language is sterner. She speaks of a “zero optionality” mindset: when the desired outcome is the only acceptable one, the team keeps searching for a path. Her own maxim is to lead by working hardest. The inheritance from the electrician on the bicycle is plain.

There is another side to the operating system. Women hold 70 percent of Insider One's senior executive roles, according to the company. Programs including SheCodes and SheLeads have offered training and mentorship. Roughly a quarter of employees became shareholders through the company's equity program. These are concrete choices about who gets authority, instruction and a piece of the outcome. They also complicate the chest-beating idiom in which technology ambition is usually narrated.

Cilingir also talks about the productive argument between evidence and instinct. Her advice to founders is to listen to customers and to the gut. The conjunction matters. Customers can name friction with exquisite accuracy; they are less reliable at designing an unfamiliar future. Instinct without customers becomes vanity. Customers without instinct can produce a faster horse with excellent retention emails.

She arrives as the buyer

The 2024 round supplied capital for artificial intelligence, American expansion and acquisitions. In May 2026, the theory became a transaction: Insider One acquired Bluecore, a U.S. retail technology company used by more than 400 enterprise brands. Bluecore brought identity and behavioral data infrastructure, retail expertise and an AI shopping agent called alby. Insider One brought a wider engagement platform and a large international footprint.

The symbolism was hard to miss. A software company founded in Turkey, scaled through markets commonly treated as side roads, had bought a Silicon Valley-based AI unicorn. Insider One now reports more than 2,000 customers across over 30 countries and a staff of more than 1,500 representing over 50 nationalities. Its customers include Samsung, L'Oréal, Unilever, Allianz, Toyota and Singapore Airlines. The home office has acquired quite a commute.

Cilingir frames AI as infrastructure rather than ornament. In her account, software agents should increasingly decide and act across customer interactions while human marketing teams set outcomes and concentrate on higher-value work. That claim deserves the usual scrutiny applied whenever software volunteers to make decisions. It also follows the line she has pursued since English & More: fewer fragmented handoffs, more continuity in the experience.

Her story is often filed under women in technology, Turkish entrepreneurship or the rise of marketing software. Each label is accurate and incomplete. The more interesting theme is geographic confidence. Cilingir did not behave as if a company built outside the accepted center had to apologize for the address. She treated early markets as classrooms and difference as operating work. By the time the company turned seriously toward America, it had already learned how to cross borders.

There is a tendency to describe unconventional routes as though the traveler became lost. Cilingir's route looks increasingly deliberate: Bursa supplied the ethic, London the economics, Shanghai the habit of cultural immersion, Fethiye the first commercial experiment, and Asia the rehearsal for scale. Silicon Valley appears late on the itinerary. When it does, she is carrying a checkbook.

• Hande Cilingir at Insider One
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• Watch Insider One talks and interviews on YouTube
• Watch her NYSE interview
• Hear the three-part founder interview