Turkey
Colombia’s Merqueo bags $50M to expand its online grocery delivery service across Latin America
Merqueo offers more than 8,000 products, including fresh foods, packaged goods, home essentials, beverages and frozen products. It currently operates in more than 25 cities and has over 600,000 users.
Hepsiburada — Turkey’s giant online shopping platform considered the Amazon of its country — floats on the Nasdaq today, for a valuation likely to exceed $3.9 billion on current projections,…
Dream Games raises $155M at a $1B valuation as its Royal Match puzzle game hits a royal flush
Istanbul in Turkey continues to prove itself as very fertile ground for casual gaming startups, which appear to be growing from small seedlings into sizable trees. In the latest development,…
Android shared information today about six features that will roll out this summer. Some of these are just quality of life upgrades, like starring text messages to easily find them…
Mobile game spending hits record $1.7B per week in Q1 2021, up 40% from pre-pandemic levels
The COVID-19 pandemic drove increased demand for mobile gaming, as consumers under lockdowns looked to online sources of entertainment, including games. But even as COVID-19 restrictions are easing up, the…
Australian ID verification startup OCR Labs raises $15M Series A to expand into UK/Turkey/Europe
With the gig economy came the need for ID verification, thus startups like OnFido appeared, alongside several others. But this sector is by no means done yet. Now, OCR Labs,…
Ace Games, a Turkish mobile gaming company founded by a former Peak Games co-founder, has raised a $7 million seed funding round led by Actera Group. Co-investment has come from…
Earlybird Digital East Fund — a fund associated with Germany’s Earlybird VC, but operating separately — has launched a €200 million ($242 million) successor fund. The fund’s focus will remain…
US says India, Italy and Turkey digital taxes are discriminatory, but won’t take any actions for now
Digital services taxes adopted by India, Italy and Turkey in recent years discriminate against U.S. companies, the U.S. Trade Representative said on Wednesday. USTR, which began investigations into the three…
Research papers come out far too rapidly for anyone to read them all, especially in the field of machine learning, which now affects (and produces papers in) practically every industry…
Warren gets $1.4 million to help local cloud infrastructure providers compete against Amazon and other giants
Started as a side project by its founders, Warren is now helping regional cloud infrastructure service providers compete against Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Google and other tech giants. Based in Tallinn,…
SpaceX staff and members of the media have been inundated this morning with emails ostensibly from concerned Armenians around the world, asking the company to cancel a launch contract with…
A new report released today by App Annie digs into how Gen Z consumers engage with their smartphones and mobile apps. According to data collected in Q3 2020, Gen Z…
Bitpanda, a crypto assets platform, has closed a $52 million Series A funding round from Valar Ventures, a venture capital firm backed by Peter Thiel. Vienna-based VC Speedinvest also participated,…
Meditation app Meditopia secures $15M Series A co-led by Creandum and Highland
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact us in ways that stretch well beyond our physical health, and one side effect of that in the tech world has been a surge…
Zynga acquires Turkey’s Peak Games for $1.8B, after buying its card games studio for $100M in 2017
Today, some news of a huge acquisition out of Turkey that represents the first billion-dollar-plus exit for a startup out of the country. Social gaming company Zynga confirmed that it…
Tech companies are getting so large that Russia is fast-tracking laws aimed at developing “digital sovereignty.” How will these regulations affect tech companies looking to do business in the country?
Glovo exits the Middle East and drops two LatAm markets in latest food delivery crunch
The new year isn’t even a month old and the food delivery crunch is already taking big bites. Spain’s Glovo has today announced it’s exiting four markets — which it…
Two and a half years after being blocked by the Turkish government, Wikipedia appears to have received a reprieve. The country’s constitutional court this week ruled that the April 2017…
New research by the Oxford Internet Institute has found that social media manipulation is getting worse, with rising numbers of governments and political parties making cynical use of social media…
The government of Sri Lanka has temporarily blocked access to several social media services following deadly explosions that ripped through the country, killing at least 207 people and injuring hundreds…
Mswipe, an Indian fintech company that develops point-of-sale terminals for merchants, has pulled $30 million in new funding as it bids to triple its reach to 1.5 million merchants over…
After the Federal Aviation Administration issued a statement late yesterday doubling down on its decision to keep the Boeing 737 Max planes at the heart of two accident investigations flying,…
Bad news from Apple and signs of slowing international and domestic growth sent stocks tumbling in Thursday trading on all of the major markets. Investors erased some $75 billion in…
The website of the Saudi government’s upcoming Future Investment Initiative conference was hacked and defaced with images of the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Several reporters tweeted screenshots of the site…
It’s been over five years since NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden lifted the lid on government mass surveillance programs, revealing, in unprecedented detail, quite how deep the rabbit hole goes thanks to…
A few days ago, Facebook quietly introduced a “Lite” version of its Facebook app for iOS devices, but only in a single market, Turkey. The app had been previously available…
Yesterday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for a boycott of all U.S. technology during a speech in the country’s capital city of Ankara. “Every product that we buy in foreign…
Wikipedia, the online user-generated encyclopedia, has been blocked by the Turkish government. News of the blockage was first reported by the website Turkey Blocks, at around 1AM Eastern this morning. Confirmed:…
In 2008 I had the privilege to travel to Istanbul to check out the tech scene. I’d arranged a tech startups meet-up with Arda Kutsal, a local blogger who’d started…
