A student can arrive at Türkiye’s Entrepreneurship Foundation without a company, a business plan or even a settled ambition to become a founder. That is a revealing entrance requirement for an organization with entrepreneurship in its name. GİRVAK, as the foundation is known, works on the person who might eventually write the pitch. The pitch can wait.
Its fellowship combines financial support, contact with experienced people and a community that continues after the formal program. Around that core, GİRVAK has assembled technical academies, corporate partnerships and support for emerging businesses. The interesting question is how an institution built to encourage young people came to help establish an investment fund. The answer begins with a founder who wished he had encountered entrepreneurship sooner.
The introduction Sina Afra wanted earlier
Sina Afra, the Markafoni co-founder who led GİRVAK’s creation in 2014, had followed a familiar route into professional life. In a launch-year interview with Capital, he described growing up with advice to find a secure employer after graduation. Working around entrepreneurs at eBay helped him imagine another possibility. Exposure changed the available choices.
That experience supplied the foundation’s starting point. Türkiye already had organizations offering entrepreneurs training, connections and money. In a 2015 interview, Afra named Etohum, Endeavor and investment networks among them. Their common entry point, he argued, was someone who had already decided to become an entrepreneur. He wanted to reach university students before that decision.
GİRVAK launched with a substantial trustee group and corporate support. The design was practical: introduce students to working entrepreneurs, give them a wider network and ask them to spread what they learned on campus. A student did not need to invent a business to make the experiment worthwhile. Simply seeing a credible alternative to the expected career path was part of the work.
TL500, twelve times
The original fellowship had an unusually tangible promise. Launch coverage described a scholarship of TL500 a month for 12 months. That adds up to TL6,000 per fellow in 2014 money, before the costs of running the program. The figure belongs to that period; it should stay attached to its date.
Students were also expected to meet entrepreneurs regularly and act as entrepreneurship ambassadors at their universities. Cash and contact sat in the same package. The scholarship made support material, while the meetings gave recipients something a transfer alone could not provide: access to people who had tried building a business.
₺6,000 per fellow annually
Calculated from the launch offer; excludes program delivery costs.
The distinction still matters when describing GİRVAK’s economics. Its beneficiaries are students and founders; its supporting relationships include donors and institutional partners. Corporate partners bring resources and specialist knowledge. A scholarship is one expense within that arrangement. It is not a price charged to the student, and it says little by itself about the full cost of delivering the experience.
A selective door, a longer relationship
Demand grew quickly. Webrazzi reported that GİRVAK accepted 50 new members from 30,000 applications in 2015. Its 2016 coverage described approximately twice as many applications and 100 fellows being supported. These are measures of interest and capacity. They do not tell us how many businesses eventually survived.
The current fellowship page describes a two-year experience for university students in Türkiye aged 17 to 24, in their third year or above. A Challenger track serves preparatory, first- and second-year students. Mentoring, monthly FellowUp gatherings and a scholarship accompany the main program. Alumni retain access to the community, events and professional connections.
“We look at who you are.”
GİRVAK’s description of fellowship selection
Those few words leave room for a person whose grades or first business idea would make a poor summary of their potential. They also put considerable responsibility on the selection process. An institution promising to recognize people has to make its encounters with applicants feel like a fair opportunity to be understood.
The applicant who feared an elite club
One fellow’s public account offers a useful view from the other side of the table. Writing in 2022, Çiğdem Afat described applying twice and worrying throughout the process about rejection. She initially saw GİRVAK as an elite environment and doubted whether she could speak comfortably in an interview.
Her conversation with interviewer Emin Okutan shifted that expectation. In her telling, it became a warm exchange that ended with book recommendations and useful material. A later interview brought encouraging feedback; she described embracing her friends and crying afterward. This is one participant’s experience, with all the limits of an individual account. It nevertheless makes the promise of access less abstract.
For an applicant, the practical lesson is modest: rejection need not settle the matter, and preparation includes learning to explain yourself. For an institution, the lesson is more demanding. A prestigious network can intimidate the very people it hopes to welcome. The quality of a conversation becomes part of the program’s delivery.
When the classroom moved toward AI
GİRVAK’s broader reach is visible in the academy it runs with Google Türkiye and T3 Girişim Merkezi. Google’s Games and Apps Academy, announced in 2021, became the AI and Technology Academy. In December 2024, Google described the change as a response to emerging skills needs and Türkiye’s national AI strategy.
The revised offering covered AI application development, data science and game development. Google reported that the predecessor had trained more than 6,000 young people over three years, with applications from all 81 provinces. Those figures belong to the joint academy. They should not be mistaken for the size of the fellowship.
The academy’s published proposition is free online education for 2,000 university students or graduates aged 18 to 29. Its learning activities include technical workshops, entrepreneurship content, team competitions and a graduation bootcamp. The schedule makes room for producing something together, alongside learning the underlying tools.
- 01Learn the toolsTechnical courses and workshops
- 02Build with a teamIdeathons and 72-hour challenges
- 03Develop the ideaGraduation bootcamp and mentorship
For a learner, this supplies a more specific route than a general invitation to be entrepreneurial. For the foundation, it represents an expansion of expertise through partners. The curriculum changed; the interest in helping young people act on opportunity remained recognizable.
Borrowing an industry’s knowledge
Boeing’s account dates Airpreneurs to 2017. The program used aviation entrepreneurship workshops to engage university students, connecting GİRVAK’s youth focus with an industry partner’s domain. It is an example of how the foundation can organize support around a field that requires more than general business advice.
Nurol Holding’s Terra Future Labs adds another field. Announced in January 2025, the partnership supports sustainable agricultural technology ventures, with eligibility directed toward people aged 18 to 35 and ventures with a woman founder or co-founder. Its brief includes regenerative agriculture and environmentally conscious technologies.
These programs help explain GİRVAK’s place in the market. A university incubator may offer a campus base; an investor may assess a company for capital. GİRVAK can connect a particular group of people with a particular body of expertise. The value depends on the match. Aviation advice is useful when aviation is the problem at hand.
The point where inspiration needed money
GİRVAK’s own institutional history explains why its remit widened. As fellows began businesses, including ventures with social or environmental aims, the foundation developed additional support. It now describes talent, access to finance and cooperation across sectors as barriers it works to address.
Founder One made the finance question concrete. GİRVAK helped establish the impact investment fund with Türkiye Bilişim Vakfı and Maxis. Gedik Yatırım’s 2022 annual report records a TL2.5 million commitment to the fund and describes its targeted size as TL300 million. This is investment capital in a separate vehicle, with a different purpose from fellowship scholarships.
The organizational change is revealing. Introducing someone to entrepreneurship can lead to a new request: help finding the people and money to execute an idea. GİRVAK’s expansion follows that progression. It also requires keeping the accounts conceptually tidy. Fund capital, donor support and a student’s stipend are different kinds of money, even when they appear in the same institutional story.
A recovery agenda, built into the brief
TSKB Co-Venture, announced in August 2025, brings the foundation into another concrete setting. The bank partnership supports teams working on climate, health, education and disaster technologies. It prioritizes women entrepreneurs and teams from provinces affected by the February 6 earthquakes.
The announced design separates idea-stage and more advanced ventures. Training, mentoring, early product development, market entry and investor conversations sit within its scope. GİRVAK subsequently advertised a May 31, 2026 deadline for advanced-stage applications, showing the relationship extending into another year.
The useful feature is specificity. A team recovering from disruption needs advice fitted to its stage and circumstances. Defining a priority population and a set of sectors gives a partnership a clearer assignment than simply promising to encourage innovation. It also gives prospective participants a way to judge whether the program fits them.
What a smaller organization can borrow
A university club could begin with a recurring meeting between students and working entrepreneurs. Add modest practical support, ask participants to share what they learn, and keep former members involved. Those are portable elements of GİRVAK’s original design. They require organization and follow-through, even without a national trustee network.
The conditions matter. Selective fellowships cannot accommodate every interested student. Online technical education assumes time, equipment and connectivity. Mentoring depends on people showing up repeatedly. A founder who needs immediate working capital has a different problem from a student exploring possible careers.
GİRVAK’s most useful idea is the decision to take that exploring student seriously. A future employer, collaborator or founder may be sitting in the room. The organization gives that person more people to talk to, more things to try and, sometimes, a little money to make participation possible. The next move remains theirs.