Seventy-three startups have to date graduated from Turkey’s leading information and communication technologies company Türk Telekom’s PILOT venture acceleration program, which has just completed its eighth term.

Thirty of these startups are preparing to open up to the world and receive investments. Türk Telekom has invested in four startups, including PILOT alumni, with its corporate venture capital company TT Ventures.

"Agile technology startups starting with small formations now direct the world economy," Türk Telekom Strategy, Planning and Digital Assistant General Manager Barış Karakullukçu said. "Turkey has great potential in this sense. As Türk Telekom, we focus on revealing this potential and supporting startups with our knowledge and financial resources."

Health, education, energy

With TT Ventures, Karakullukçu said they invested in various fields, especially in the health, education and energy sectors.

"We supported DoctorTurkey, Turkey’s first online health care platform, and Virasoft, a local software company providing services in the field of digital pathology. We invested in MentalUP, which provides personalized educational intelligence games for children, and Eltemtek, which provides engineering, project and consultancy services to private and public institutions in Turkey's critical energy infrastructure projects," he explained.

Financial technologies

Türk Telekom also continues to offer innovative products and services to its customers by collaborating with PILOT graduate startups.

In this context, TT Payment and Electronic Money Services signed an agreement with "Sanction Scanner," an eighth term graduate of PILOT, which provides a security solution for detecting crime revenues.

The 30 startups graduating from PILOT and receiving investments focus on areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), education and health technologies, virtual reality, cloud-based applications, mobile applications, developer applications, e-sports and e-commerce.