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Game Factory wants your game to become a business
A working prototype is only the beginning. The Istanbul incubator connects developers with coaches, publishers and platform partners to tackle the harder job: keeping a studio alive.
Tech Istanbul Opens the Door to a City-Sized Customer
Free support is the easy part to explain. Tech Istanbul’s more interesting offer is a chance to test a startup’s product inside the machinery of Istanbul’s municipal services.
Fintech Zone Istanbul wants to get startups through the bank’s door
Inside Istanbul Financial Center, a fintech technopark is building a route from R&D projects to corporate pilots. Its Fintech Gate program starts with a useful demand: make the big company do its homework, too.
Lonca’s pitch: a bank that might become your customer
Kuveyt Türk’s startup accelerator offers grants without taking equity. Its more interesting proposition is a chance to put a young company’s technology to work inside the bank.
BUBA Ventures: A good idea still needs a way in
An alumni angel network grew into a meeting point for founders, investors, banks and even orchard technology. BUBA’s history shows what startup support looks like when the introductions come with homework.
The Photo Editor That Refused to Chase Photoshop - and Outlasted Almost Everyone
Two founders bootstrapped a photo editor for 16 months on family money, turned down the growth-at-all-costs playbook, and built a quietly profitable creative tool used by tens of millions - one Cartoonizer click at a time.
The Turkish Word for Owner Became a Verb
Turkey's biggest marketplace started with 2,700 classified ads in 2000. A quarter century later, 'sahibinden' is how the country buys a house, sells a car, and rents an apartment - so much so that the name stopped being a website and started being a habit.
Baris Karadogan
Baris Karadogan is the co-founder and CEO of Jingle, a Menlo Park startup that turns local stores and services into roving mobile vendors that drive through neighborhoods and ping nearby shoppers through an app. An Istanbul-raised, Stanford-trained engineer who spent a decade as a venture capitalist at firms including ComVentures, Fuse Capital and U.S. Venture Partners, he traded the investor's chair for the founder's seat to attack the high fees and long waits of conventional delivery. Jingle raised a $2.9 million seed round in 2023 with Bessemer Venture Partners. Off the clock he is a serious birdwatcher who spent nine years on the board of California Audubon.