Turkey, where 4 unicorns (which one of them is Getir) that take the lead in the mobile games industry and marketplace emerged only this year, Geometry Venture Development enables investors and companies who identify venture capitals and private equities as risky and high budget to become angel investors with little by no risks by investing $20K to technology startups’ seed rounds.
The founder Melih Efeoglu states that he established the fund two years ago to support the startups to reach the capital they need, commercialize, and start operating overseas in a short time. All seven investments Geometry Venture Development made were during the pandemic.
Efeoglu mentions that even though more than 30 active VCs in Turkey made investments worth $350M, the experience of a long searching period of early startups to raise pre-seed capital is caused by the absence of angel investors. At the same time, Efeoglu shares that Geometry Venture Development came to life and avoid the struggle for survival by also doing project and consultancy work, leaving aside the product development to solve the problem that startups were focusing on.
In GVD, where individual and institutional investors can participate in an angel investment network as an LP for the participation fee, the shareholders of GVD currently consist of 57 individual investors and 8 companies, of which one of them is public. Unlike VCs and private equities, LPs aren’t charged management fees, so the GVD’s source of revenue is the consultancy services they provide. Continuing its activities as a joint-stock company within the framework of Turkish regulation, Geometry Venture Development’s future goal is to turn into a Venture Capital Investment Fund, whose shares are traded on the stock exchange, within a year.
Having the mindset of startup = growth and prioritizing the B2C and D2C business models; GVD’s portfolio includes Nebyan Dogal a sustainable farming startup, P2P barter platform Barty, HoustonBionics a USA based startup operating in healthcare, Octovan providing services on logistics and transportation, BarakaTech a B2B SuperApp platform, SaaS startups Enhencer, GlaucoT smart wearable medical device for glaucoma disease treatment and finally the OdaStudio. 3 of these companies received further capital, and overall these 8 companies raised more than $2,5M from 30 angel investors and 8 VCs.
Efeoglu, who has experience of more than 8 years in the startup industry working with tech startups in areas of commercializing, business development, and investments; started his career in a USA-based angel investment network (Keiretsu Forum) and had further experiences working with an incubation center, a corporate and a VC. Throughout his career Efeoglu helped tech startups to raise more than $4M either as direct investments or as funds.
Currently, the Turkish startup market is under a remarkable economic transformation and Turkish startups have started to focus on the global markets. Efeoglu believes, following the outstanding mobile game unicorns, strong global unicorns will emerge from Turkey especially in the fields of fintech and health tech, in the medium term.