Online Event
Revo Capital’s Cross-Border Strategy: Regional Startups to Global Success
Ask the Experts: Top Investors Reveal What It Takes to Get Funded!
Date
Jan 27, 2026
Time
04:00 am - 05:30 am
Address
Online Event
Are you looking to raise funding for your startup or planning to raise in the future? Join our exclusive Ask Me Anything (AMA) event featuring Cenk Bayrakdar? Founding Partner & Managing Director at Revo Capital. In this session, you'll get insider insights on how funding works, how investors evaluate pitches, and what they're really looking for in founders. Whether you're preparing for your first round or still refining your business idea, this AMA is your chance to ask real investors your burning questions. Come ready to learn and engage! Our investors are here to help you take your startup to the next level.
How do startups born in emerging markets break regional ceilings and scale into globally competitive companies?
This session explores the cross-border scaling strategy behind Revo Capital, Türkiye’s first institutional venture capital firm and today the country’s most active early-stage technology investor. Revo Capital has raised $250M across three funds, completed 50 investments and 18 exits, and supported its portfolio companies in attracting $3.5B+ in follow-on funding, with 92% coming from international investors.
At the core of this strategy is Fund III, which completed an $86M first close in March 2025 and is targeting $100M+ in 2026. Fund III is purpose-built to back globally ambitious founders with Turkish roots at the critical scale-up stage. The fund focuses primarily on Series A and early Series B investments, typically writing $1–5M checks, while allocating up to 5% of fund size to a Seed Pocket for early access to high-potential companies. In its first year alone, Fund III completed 10 investments, and Revo plans to invest in 30 technology companies over the next five years.
Revo’s investment focus spans fintech, B2B SaaS, cybersecurity & cloud operations, health tech, energy, and gaming, with AI as a core enabler across all verticals — sectors where Türkiye’s engineering strength intersects most clearly with global demand. Across its portfolio, Revo applies a Global HQ + Türkiye R&D model, enabling companies to scale commercial operations in strong-currency markets while continuing to build world-class engineering teams in Türkiye.
In this session, you’ll learn how Revo evaluates global potential from the earliest stages, distinguishes regional traction from globally scalable traction, and actively supports founders as they expand across markets. The discussion will focus on practical frameworks, real portfolio patterns, and data-backed insights, not theory, for founders aiming to build global category leaders.
🎙 Featured Speaker
Cenk Bayrakda - Founding Partner & Managing Director, Revo Capital
Cenk Bayrakdar is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Revo Capital, Türkiye’s first institutional venture capital firm. With 25+ years of experience across technology, innovation, and venture investing, he has played a pivotal role in connecting Turkish founders with global capital markets.
Before founding Revo Capital in 2013, Cenk spent 13 years at Turkcell in senior leadership roles, where he led major digital and fintech initiatives, including the launch of the world’s first SIM-based mobile wallet and Turkcell TV+. Under his leadership, Revo Capital has raised $250M+ across three funds, completed 50 investments and 18 exits, and backed many of Türkiye’s most successful global technology companies.
Cenk works closely with founders on product strategy, global scale-up, and cross-border fundraising, and regularly serves on boards and advisory councils across Türkiye’s business and technology ecosystem.
Moderator:
- Erdinc Ekinci - Founder, Investment Lead of Co-capital.vc, Co-Founder, CEO of Openfor.co, Managing Director of Founder Institute Japan/Korea/Taiwan
📌 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!
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