Why is Fintech Dominating the Turkish Start-Up Ecosystem?
Fintech is dominating Turkey's startup businesses after a record year of investment.
Along with the second-place sector in terms of investment - gaming - it accounted for 68% of total capital allocation in the country during 2025, according to data from startups.watch, which analyses business startups in Turkey.
Turkish startups attracted a total of US$589million across 306 funding rounds last year, with fintech investment increasing by about 10% year-on-year.
Startups including Sipay and Midas played a central role in this growth, securing some of the year's largest deals.
Sipay prides itself on being Turkey’s largest fintech company. It offers a financial marketplace that enables businesses to monitor and manage their entire financial landscape from a single platform and has a company valuation of US$875m.
It also boasts one of the country’s largest physical POS networks and an end-to-end Embedded Finance infrastructure.
Investment platform Midas raised US$80m of Series B funding in 2025.
It serves 3.5million investors by providing access to Borsa Istanbul, US stock markets, mutual funds and cryptocurrencies through a single platform.
Midas is using the new capital to strengthen its security infrastructure to international standards and accelerate the launch of advanced products designed for active traders.
Papara has been another rapidly growing success story, which has introduced several groundbreaking features.
Fintech is proving a significant boost to a strong economy
While the Turkish economy is performing well compared to the US and Western Europe, the boost from the fintech sector will be welcomed by the government.
Speaking at the Startup Ecosystem Annual Meeting in Istanbul this month, Burak Dağlıoğlu, head of the Presidential Investment and Finance Office, highlighted the rise in foreign direct investment flowing into Turkey.
Burak noted that US$12.4bn in foreign direct investment entered the country in the first 11 months of 2025: a 27% increase compared with the previous year.
Burak stressed that startup financing and technology entrepreneurship were playing a critical role.
He added that the government is placing strategic emphasis on AI infrastructure, data centres and energy requirements, and that a fintech-focused technopark established within the Istanbul Financial Center (IFC) will become a new hub for service exporters, offering advantages such as foreign-currency book keeping.
Riding a positive wave of sentiment
The positive fintech investment news in Turkey reflects the latest sentiment around the world, according to new data from the UK’s Innovate Finance.
This data showed that global investment in fintech rebounded by more than one-fifth in 2025 - an increase of 21% - taking total investment to US$53bn.
The US remains dominant in the fintech market, with capital invested of US$25.1bn, or nearly half of the global total.
The UK is in second place ($3.6bn) with India in third ($3.4bn), Innovate Finance’s FinTech Investment Landscape 2025 report shows.
London is the top city on FinTech Magazine's Top 10 fintech hubs list. Fintech is also seeing rapid growth in Scotland.
The number of fintech companies in Scotland has more than doubled in the space of five years, as interest in fintech use cases continues to grow.
The nation’s fintech cluster has increased to 260 companies from 120 companies in 2021, with 10% growth in 2025.
Sector body FinTech Scotland believes growth in the nation has been driven by higher levels of investment, deeper partnerships across industry, academia and the public sector, and more businesses scaling up and trading internationally.
