B2B funding rounds and amounts in Türkiye: the 2025 picture

Short answer: Türkiye's 2025 stage picture: 284 seed rounds totalling $162 million (down 50% in a year), 22 rounds at Series A and B totalling $427 million (up 15%), and zero rounds at Series C and beyond. The conversion rate from seed to the next stage was roughly 13%. Fintech and gaming took 68% of all capital deployed. For a B2B SaaS founder the practical meaning is this: seed is a real and reachable market but a small one, Series A is a narrow gate, and later-stage capital does not exist domestically. Plan for that, or you spend the seed as growth fuel and never build the bridge.

First, why there are two different totals

Two totals for 2025 are in circulation and both are correct. The startups.watch Year in Review 2025 reports 306 rounds and $589 million, excluding Getir and BiGG. The report KPMG publishes with the same data provider gives 360 rounds and $1.4 billion.

The difference is methodological: which transactions and which state-backed programmes are counted. So one figure cannot be substituted for the other. The stage breakdown below comes from the Year in Review, so that it stays consistent with the total published by the source that broke it down.

Stage by stage: 2025

• Seed: 284 rounds, $162 million in total. Down 50% in a year. Average round roughly $570,000 (the total divided by the round count).
• Early VC (Series A and B): 22 rounds, $427 million. Up 15% in a year.
• Later VC (Series C and beyond): 0 rounds, $0. Down 100% on the previous year.
• Seed to early-VC conversion: roughly 13%, which the report describes as materially below comparable markets.
• Total: 306 rounds, $589 million. Round count down 48%, capital down 45%. Seven startups took 62% of all funding.

Startup Genome's GSER 2025 completes the picture: Istanbul's median seed round is $487,000 and median Series A is $2 million. Average and median agree, so a seed round in Türkiye is an instrument of around half a million dollars.

The hardest figure here is the zero. No later-stage capital was written in Türkiye at all in 2025. For a B2B startup that means scale capital is not a domestic option.

Where the money went

• Fintech: $219.7 million, a record year.
• Gaming: $180.9 million.
• Marketplaces: $70.4 million.
• AI: $36.4 million, while one in every four investments went to an AI startup. Many rounds, small cheques.

Fintech and gaming alone accounted for 68% of capital deployed. Classic B2B SaaS does not appear as a line of its own. The practical consequence: benchmarking your expectations against fintech round sizes will mislead you, because the pool left over is visibly thinner and the cheques smaller.

The money that scales you is foreign

The split in KPMG's 2025 report makes this explicit: domestic investors joined 318 rounds and put in $227 million; foreign investors joined 42 rounds and put in $1.145 billion. Roughly 12% of rounds carried 82% of the capital.

The first half of 2025 was also weak: 91 rounds, $211 million, with foreign investors in only 17 of them. The full-year figure rises on a handful of large second-half transactions. I set out the link between going abroad and reaching capital, with its numbers, in a separate article.

Exits

2025 saw 42 acquisitions and secondary transactions totalling $2.4 billion. Startup Genome recorded 99 exits worth $4.79 billion across 2020 to 2024. The exit side is livelier than the investment side.

Three new unicorns emerged in 2025: Airalo, Periodic Labs and Fal. All three were founded by the Turkish diaspora, which is to say abroad. That detail is not incidental; it is the other face of the later-stage zero above.

The non-dilutive option: TÜBİTAK BiGG

For the pre-seed stage the most common institutional source is TÜBİTAK's BiGG programme. In the investment-based 1812 version the structure is: support given as equity participation, convertible debt, or both. In phase two (pre-seed) the maximum stake is 5%, and in phase three (seed) 10%. Phase two runs up to 18 months, phase three for 36 months following completion of the investment.

The upper limits are not fixed in the programme itself; they are set by the Board of Directors and announced in each call. That is why no lira figure appears here: for the current amount you need to read the text of the call you intend to apply to.

What it means for a B2B founder

• Plan the seed as distance, not as a bridge. With 13% conversion and zero later-stage activity, assuming the next round will arrive is a hope, not a plan. Work out in advance how far half a million dollars actually takes you.
• Burn multiple is the binding metric. Because round sizes are small, you have to show the same growth on less money. Which metric binds at which stage, with benchmark numbers, is in the metrics article.
• Prepare abroad for scale capital. If the money that scales you is foreign, then the structure, customers and narrative that investor wants to see are also built abroad. That preparation does not happen in six months.
• Do not benchmark against fintech rounds. The pool in your vertical is thinner and the cheques will be smaller. Knowing that going in changes how you manage expectations in the room.

To see how far that capital takes you in a target market, the pipeline calculator works backwards from a revenue goal. The traps on the payments, tax and distribution side are collected in a separate article.

Sources

1. Turkish Startup Ecosystem: Year in Review 2025startups.watch, 212 ve Inveo Ventures desteğiyle (Turcorn 100 üzerinden yayımlanan PDF)
2. Türkiye Startup Yatırımları 2025KPMG Türkiye, startups.watch verisiyle, Mart 2026
3. Istanbul Rising: How Türkiye Became a Global Leader Among Emerging EcosystemsStartup Genome, Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2025
4. 1812 Yatırım Tabanlı Girişimcilik Destek Programı (BiGG Yatırım)TÜBİTAK
5. 2025 Yılının İlk Yarısında Türkiye Startup Ekosisteminden Öne Çıkan GelişmelerFinTech İstanbul, Temmuz 2025

Every figure above is linked to its primary source and dated. Where a number is asserted by a source rather than measured, the text says so. If you find something out of date, tell me and I will correct it.