Sunvest Investments

Founder Ömer Özkan leads the investment committee as Managing Partner. Mert Şen, promoted to Partner in 2023, co-leads deal sourcing and due diligence. The lean structure means both partners are directly involved in every investment decision—there is no external investment committee or passive advisory board. This gives the firm a reputation for fast decision-making in competitive seed rounds.

Sunvest operates as a regulated asset manager raising third-party capital through traditional venture capital fund structures—not a family office. The firm raised its first two funds primarily from Turkish institutional LPs and high-net-worth individuals. Fund III, targeting $30 million, expanded the LP base to include European investors seeking exposure to the Turkish tech ecosystem.

Sunvest focuses on seed and Series A rounds, with initial checks ranging from $500,000 to $3 million. The firm reserves significant capital for follow-on investments in breakout portfolio companies, typically through Series B. Sunvest does not participate in pre-seed or late-stage growth rounds as a lead investor, though it has occasionally joined Series C rounds as a minority participant alongside larger international funds.

The firm's primary sourcing channel is its network of Turkish founders and operators, many of whom worked at local unicorns like Getir, Peak Games, or Trendyol before founding their own companies. Sunvest also maintains relationships with university entrepreneurship programs at Boğaziçi, Koç, and Sabancı, as well as with Turkish diaspora founders in Berlin and London. The firm rarely competes in cold inbound processes, preferring referred founders.

Sunvest only makes direct investments into operating companies—it has never committed capital as a limited partner to other venture funds. The firm views fund-of-funds commitments as inconsistent with its hands-on, operator-embedded model. This direct-only posture distinguishes it from several Turkish peers that blend direct investing with LP positions in US or European venture funds.

Sunvest has publicly stated it does not invest in consumer retail, crypto or Web3 protocols, or capital-intensive hard tech that requires more than $10 million to reach commercialization. The firm also avoids sectors where Turkish regulatory risk is acute, including online gambling, unregulated lending, and consumer fintech that relies on arbitraging Turkish credit-card interchange fees—a strategy several competitors pursued and later abandoned.

Sunvest achieved its first significant distribution through the sale of its stake in Getir, the on-demand delivery company that reached a peak valuation of $11.8 billion in 2022. The firm has also realized partial exits through secondary sales to later-stage investors in portfolio companies including Albert Health. Sunvest has not publicly disclosed its distribution-to-paid-in ratio across any of its fund vintages, which is consistent with the opaque reporting practices common among Turkish venture managers.