eeHoew do regional startups break their market limits and scale into globally competitive companies? This session explores the cross-border strategy behind Revo Capital — a VC firm that has invested in 40+ technology startups, backed two unicorns, achieved 17+ exits, and helped portfolio companies raise hundreds of millions in follow-on funding. You’ll learn how they evaluate global potential early, identify which founders can win internationally, and support startups going from regional traction to multi-market expansion.
Revo Capital is Turkey and the region’s largest tech-focused VC platform, managing multiple funds, including a $66M Fund I, a €90M Fund II, and a third fund now targeting $100M+ with an $86M first close. Their investment approach includes writing checks from $1M–6M, maintaining a seed pocket for $250K–500K investments, and guiding startups to relocate HQs to strong-currency markets — a strategy now adopted by more than 80% of their Fund II and Fund III portfolio founders. Their model of “build locally, scale globally” has become a proven blueprint across fintech, SaaS, cybersecurity, health tech, and AI-driven products.
This session will be joined by Cenk Bayrakdar, Founding Partner & Managing Director at Revo Capital, who brings 20+ years of experience across telecom, digital innovation, and venture investing. From launching world-first digital products at Turkcell to guiding high-growth startups toward global scale, Cenk shares practical, data-backed insights founders can apply immediately. If you want real frameworks — not theory — on scaling beyond your region, this session is for you.
🎙 Featured Speaker:
- Cenk Bayrakdar – Founding Partner & Managing Director at Revo Capital - Serial Entrepreneur, and Startup Investor. Cenk co-founded Revo Capital, Turkey’s largest tech-focused venture capital fund, which has invested $180M+ across 40+ startups, backed two unicorns, and achieved 17+ successful exits. With over 20 years of experience in telecom, digital innovation, and venture capital, he has led multi-billion-dollar product portfolios at Turkcell, launching world-first platforms including mobile digital wallets, operator-branded smartphones, and multi-screen TV services. Cenk partners with founders to scale regional startups into globally competitive ventures and applies data-driven strategies for cross-border growth.
Moderator:
📌 Who Should Attend
Founders planning to scale into international markets
- Startups seeking cross-border fundraising or investor readiness
- Early-stage teams considering HQ relocation or global GTM strategy
- Entrepreneurs from emerging markets aiming to build global products
- Operators, ecosystem builders, and innovation leaders following regional → global startup models
- Anyone who wants to understand how Revo Capital evaluates and supports globally ambitious founders
📌 What You Will Learn
How Revo Capital evaluates a startup’s global expansion potential
- The cross-border scaling model that helped 80%+ of their portfolio relocate HQs to strong-currency markets
- How Fund I, II, and III investment patterns reveal what global VCs look for today
- The difference between “regional traction” and “globally scalable traction”
- Practical steps to prepare your startup for cross-border fundraising
- How founders can manage operations locally while expanding commercially abroad
- Real case patterns from Revo’s 40+ investments, 17+ exits, and two unicorns
About Ecosystem Organization:
- Founder Institute: Founder Institute, which originated in Silicon Valley, is a founder and idea stage accelerator, and with its Founder Capital, backs the best performing FI alumni as early as the angel stage. FI has over 8K+ startup portfolio (Including leading e-learning platform Udemy, IPO in Nasdaq $3,8B) across 200 cities in 100 countries around the world.) We are also the largest mentor network in the world, with over 35,000 mentors, and our alumni have already raised over $2 billion in US dollars and have recently exceeded the 10K mark of investors network as the FI-Venture-Network.
- FI’s sister program, called VC Lab, helps launch aspiring investors into launching VC firms. As an accelerator that allows both sides of the table, 70% of the activities we do are advocacy of entrepreneurship and ecosystem creation, which means we do way more activity than the accelerator to promote entrepreneurship to solve real-world problems with entrepreneurship in an economically feasible way, build a company that grows into a venture-scale.
- Openfor.co: A “Global Partnership Accelerator” originated in Silicon Valley that combined with an online platform and marketplace for learning, building, launching, monetizing, and growing partner ecosystems and a collaborative community around you for achieving effective marketing, sales, community building, GTM, fundraising, and many more.
- Co-Capital: Pre-seed & Seed stage new firm that focuses on hands-on GTM, sales, and partnership support, focusing on English-speaking Asian founders who have global ambitions from day ONE. Domiciled in the USA, with regional appearances in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Utilizes partnerships with the GTM expert network and the venture partner network across 20 major hubs and a network of 35 other VC networks who are willing to co-back our founders!