From Karaköy Garage to Global Markets: How One Istanbul Founder Is Rewriting the Agri-Tech Playbook

Defne Arslan launched Topraq out of a rented desk at İTÜ Çekirdek, the incubator attached to Istanbul Technical University's Maslak campus, in January 2024. Eighteen months later, her company has closed a $4.2 million seed round led by 212 Venture Capital and signed a pilot agreement with a cooperative of hazelnut growers in Ordu province covering roughly 3,400 hectares. The deal puts Topraq among the most-watched agri-tech names in Turkey's startup calendar.

The timing matters. Iran is in political transition following Ayatollah Khamenei's death this week, and Turkey's government has spent the past two years positioning Istanbul as the tech gateway for businesses that need a stable, sophisticated base to reach markets stretching from the Caucasus to the Gulf. The Istanbul Finance Centre in Ataşehir, which received its first permanent tenants in late 2023, was explicitly designed for exactly this kind of cross-regional ambition. Topraq fits the template almost perfectly.

Sensors in the Soil, Money From the Bosphorus

The product is straightforward in concept, complicated in execution. Topraq's wireless sensors sit roughly 30 centimetres underground and transmit moisture, temperature and nitrogen readings every 15 minutes to a cloud dashboard that farmers access on a basic Android app. The hardware costs 1,800 Turkish lira per unit at current pricing — around $52 at the July 2026 exchange rate — and the company charges a 240-lira monthly subscription per device. Arslan says the break-even for a typical smallholder comes inside one growing season through water savings alone.

The seed round closed in May and drew participation from Revo Capital, which has backed more than 30 Turkish startups since 2013, and from a family office based in Kuwait City. That Gulf connection is not incidental. Arslan spent three months in 2025 meeting agricultural ministries in Riyadh and Amman, and she credits the physical proximity of Istanbul — four hours by air from most Middle Eastern capitals — as a harder selling point than any pitch deck.

Topraq now operates from a 400-square-metre space in Bomontiada, the converted brewery complex in Şişli that has become a de facto creative and tech hub since its full opening in 2017. The office sits one floor above a ceramics studio and two floors below a podcast production company, which, Arslan has noted publicly, says something about how Istanbul's innovation scene refuses to cluster in a single sterile campus.

The Broader Ecosystem Is Starting to Show Its Weight

Turkey's startup market attracted $1.1 billion in venture funding across 2025, according to data published by Endeavor Turkey in March 2026, with fintech and agri-tech together accounting for nearly 38 percent of deals by value. Istanbul absorbed roughly 70 percent of that capital. The city's two most active incubators — İTÜ Çekirdek in Maslak and Bilgi Teknoloji Merkezi, run by Istanbul Bilgi University in Eyüpsultan — together graduated 61 startups in 2025, up from 44 in 2023.

Those numbers still look modest against London or Tel Aviv, but the trajectory has caught the attention of European development funds. The European Investment Fund signed a €150 million commitment to Turkish venture capital vehicles in October 2025, with climate-tech and food-security startups listed as priority categories — a category that covers Topraq directly.

Arslan's next milestone is a Series A, which she expects to launch in the first quarter of 2027. Before that, she has to deliver results from the Ordu pilot: the cooperative's first full season of data is due by October, and she has committed to publishing yield-comparison figures publicly rather than keeping them inside a case study. That transparency is a calculated move. Several larger agricultural-input companies, including at least one multinational distributor with a regional office near the Atatürk Organized Industrial Zone in Ikitelli, have already asked for early access to the results. Founders watching Topraq should note that she has declined partnership talks until the data is in — a discipline that is rarer in Istanbul's ecosystem than it should be.