EKONOMİ Gazetesi: Kamil Kılıç on technology investment at the Transforming Leadership Summit

The fifth “Transforming Leadership” Summit, organised by EKONOMİ Gazetesi in cooperation with PwC and with Hepsiburada as main sponsor, took place on 2–3 October 2026 at Elite World Grand Sapanca under the theme “Defying Uncertainty”. At the summit, Kamil Kılıç, CEO of Letven Capital, assessed the impact of technological transformation on how companies do business and how they make investment decisions.

Moderated by Dr. Şeref Oğuz, Chairman of the Editorial Board of EKONOMİ Gazetesi, the session titled “How Are We Transforming Our Business and Our Investments in the Wake of Technology?” also featured Mustafa Mertcan, Chairman of DOF Robotics, and Mehmet Önder, Chairman of Uyumsoft. Domestic manufacturing and intellectual property in robotics, the integration of artificial intelligence into management processes, and the financing mechanisms that would allow technology companies to scale came to the fore in the panel.

“We invested USD 8 million in a dark factory with 43 robots”

Kılıç summarised the scale of Türkiye’s venture capital ecosystem in figures: “There are close to 640 venture capital funds in Türkiye today. The value created by these funds’ investments has reached roughly TRY 650 billion. The ecosystem holds around 3,000 companies and close to 25,000 investors. Yet the share of venture capital funds within total fund size is still below 1 percent. For our part, we raised USD 100 million over the past five years and created roughly USD 400 million in value.”

First the unsolved problem, then the company

Describing Letven Capital’s investment approach, Kılıç said: “In entrepreneurship we first have to find the unsolved problems of a sector. We find the domain expert who can solve a corporate company’s problem and combine that with academic knowledge and technology. When the resulting solution finds a response from the customer, we turn it into a company and make our venture capital investment.” Noting that they had invested USD 8 million on the Physical AI side, Kılıç said they are working with domain experts who have spent years in shipyards on a structure that would allow production to be carried out in a dark factory.

“There is a financing gap after venture capital”

Kılıç identified the broken link in the financing chain as the ecosystem’s most critical shortcoming: “In Türkiye there is a significant financing gap at the stage after venture capital. Growth capital needs to arrive so the company can scale. Banking finance, pension funds and capital markets can then come into play. But because of the missing link in this chain we are suffering considerable losses. We need to develop more efficient, more resilient funds that keep the sector alive, and channel resources towards companies that produce technology and have growth potential.”