Tarentum, which is one of the best artificial intelligence companies in Turkey and has achieved significant success especially in the renewable energy and gaming sectors, received an investment of $1.4 million from Bogazici Ventures.
Bogazici Ventures, which establishes and manages funds that invest in technology startups, focuses on early-stage startups in the fields of gaming, fintech, digital health and retail technologies through its investment fund BV Growth. It invested $1.4 million in Tarentum, a venture company that offers artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions in the renewable energy and gaming industry and has achieved great success.
GAME AND ENERGY FOCUSED
Tarentum founding partners Oguz Silahtar, Bora Tokyay and Gun Makinabakan met at Tarentum to develop disruptive technologies and solutions in the field of artificial intelligence after working for many years in leading companies in the USA, following their undergraduate and graduate education at schools such as MIT, Lafayette College and Purdue University. The team of 27 people has an average of over ten years of experience in the field of artificial intelligence.
Announcing the investment news for the first time with an event on Youtube, Bogazici Ventures hosted Tarentum founding partners Oguz Silahtar and Bora Tokyay and talked about the establishment process of Tarentum, the team, its activities in the renewable energy, games and retail sectors.
Oguz Silahtar, one of the founding partners of Tarentum, said, “As Tarentum, we have provided machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions to leading companies in different sectors in Turkey since its establishment. Finally, we decided to focus on the game and energy sectors, which we have been serving for 3 years. While we perform digital advertising optimizations in the gaming industry, we have products that we work on wind power plants in the energy sector.” Particularly, Turk Telekom’s interest in the gaming industry from the telecom industry continues. Turk Telekom was the first institution to make a major strategic investment in the gaming industry.
GROWTH REACHED 30%
Bora Tokyay’s product called GrowAds, which they developed in the field of mobile games, said, “The rapid growth in the game industry is something we all talk about and are aware of, but when we look at the marketing budget spent, we see that the growth there is larger, around 30%. Seeing an opportunity in this area, we wanted to focus on this area. There is a lot of data in the user acquisition space right now, and this data is too big for human intelligence to intervene. Thinking that this problem can be solved with artificial intelligence, we developed our product that provides digital advertising optimization.”
I’M WAITING FOR THE DAY IT’S UNICORN
Baris Ozistek, the founding partner of Bogazici Ventures, stated that the product developed by Tarentum is a solution that saves companies money thanks to the optimization realized and that everyone will want to try this product. Baris Ozistek added that scaling is unlimited for the game industry, but the competition in this sector is very intense and growth is limited for this reason, adding that he is very excited about the solution offered by Tarentum and he is looking forward to the day when the team will become a unicorn.
Source: Sabah / Translated by Irem Yildiz