Early-stage startups will 'fly' with Sabancı ARF

ISTANBUL, Dec. 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Sabancı Holding, Turkiye's leading conglomerate, is a holding company engaged in a wide variety of business activities through its subsidiaries and affiliates, mainly in the banking, financial services, energy, industrials, building materials, retail and digital sectors. Sabancı Holding is domiciled in Turkiye, with its headquarters in Istanbul.

Sabancı Group, with the aim of accelerating innovation and technology ideas and contributing to the entrepreneurial ecosystem and open innovation, launched Sabancı ARF – Almost Ready to Fly program.

Sabancı Group's purpose is to unite Turkiye and the World for a sustainable life with leading enterprises. Aligned with the Group purpose, Sabancı ARF will accelerate innovation and technology investments with a growth strategy.

Sabancı ARF, provides mentorship, cooperation and investment support to early-stage startups from inside and outside the Group. A total of 14 startups completed their orientation process and started the acceleration program.

• Sabancı ARF works closely and intensively with early-stage startups for 20 weeks, to form their business model, to help them focus on the right actions to grow, to accelerate their commercialization and to connect them with real customers to pay.
• Sabancı Center office area, in the headquarter of Sabancı Holding in Istanbul, is dedicated to the entrepreneurs.
• Each startup is supported with a cash of 30K$ to utilize for their product development and/or pilot implementations.
• At the end of the acceleration program, Sabancı ARF Jury will decide to invest further or not, up to 150K$ for each startup as a pre-seed/seed investment.
• Each round will finalize with a Demo Day, where the startups will present their companies to carefully selected, invite-only investors.
• But Sabancı ARF will not end on Demo Day. Sabancı ARF and alumni network will continue to help founders to connect with new customers and/or investors.

"EVERY BUSINESS NEEDS THE RIGHT SUPPORT TO FLY"

Sabancı Holding CEO Cenk Alper, stated at the press conference that as Sabancı Group, they have positioned energy and climate technologies, advanced material technologies and digital technologies under the name of 'new economy'. He emphasized that 'new economy' is at the core of Sabancı's sustainability and digital-oriented roadmap and continued his words as follows: "While we allocate 25% of our investments to protecting and growing of our core businesses, we invest 75% in 'new economy'."

We believe, Sabancı ARF will be in the center of the ecosystem and connect startups with our corporate resources. Startups will benefit from corporate funding, resources, and customer access while they grow their business in their early stages. Sabancı ARF will contribute to their growth and their transformation from an idea into a value generating business, starting from our country to the World.

Contacts - İrem Demirbaş / idemirbas@sabanci.com