Türkiye is taking steps to establish a fully sovereign artificial intelligence infrastructure, aiming to support domestic companies while eliminating reliance on foreign technologies.
Mehmet Üner, strategy advisor at Ena Venture Capital, told Anadolu Agency (AA) that the fund wants to establish Türkiye’s sovereign AI as a major investor in early-stage AI startups in the country.
Üner, speaking on the sidelines of the startup event, Take Off Istanbul 2025, stated that the fund invests in startups operating in AI, cloud computing and cybersecurity fields. The fund is involved with pre-seed and seed stage startups.
"We are participating in Take Off Istanbul with four firms,” he said. "Orbina operates in agentic AI, Enlighty works on customer and market insights, MagicPay develops a payment processing system, and CloudFlex stands out with its hybrid cloud computing infrastructure.”
Üner stated that Orbina, in particular, has carried out large projects, especially in the finance sectors for insurers and banks, as well as in the public sector. "This is one of our investments that we are proud of,” he said.
He noted that Orbina provides advantages to institutions in terms of efficiency.
"Orbina’s offerings enable them to work more efficiently by automating tasks,” he said. "One of the most important features of Orbina is that it developed a Turkish large language model (LLM), allowing users to produce AI agents that speak our language best and provide the best assistance.”
Üner stated that another of Ena Venture Capital’s investments is Nuvena, a firm working on establishing Türkiye’s sovereign AI infrastructure.
"What we noticed when making the investment fund is that all AI startups we invest in unfortunately face infrastructure needs – they try to bridge the gap outside of Türkiye, so we said, ‘Let’s make an investment in Türkiye and create our own sovereign AI infrastructure,’ since, this way, our startups can use this as a base instead of reaching for abroad,” he said. "And we want to achieve this goal with Nuvena.”
Üner noted that the aim for the Nuvena investment is to create data center capacity in Türkiye and build an AI layer on top of it.
"With our sovereign AI layer, we want Turkish firms and startups to meet their capacity and hardware needs from inside our country instead of foreign solutions,” he added.
