EBRD invests in the rapidly growing Turkish tech company, obilet.com
12.12.2019 14:02:00 EET | Business Wire | Press release
European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) invested in obilet.com, the online sales platform for users to purchase bus and airline tickets. EBRD, which offers financing for thousands of projects to support local growth in European countries, has invested $11 billion in Turkish businesses and projects to date. Earlybird Venture Capital, an investor in obilet.com, announced that it will also participate in the next round of funding.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20191212005302/en/
EBRD added obilet.com, Turkey's fastest-growing online ticket sales platform, to its investment portfolio. Yigit Gurocak, (obilet.com CEO and Co-founder) and Ali Yılmaz, (obilet.com Co-founder) (Photo: Business Wire)
Yigit Gurocak, CEO - obilet.com, said that the company aimed to provide services to different segments of the transportation industry by expanding its teams in 2020 with the support of new investments.
The company, currently at 400 million visitors, aims to sell 18 million tickets in 2020!
obilet.com, which offers comparison and purchasing options for bus and airline tickets of more than 150 bus operators and 1000 airlines, was founded in 2012 by two university students and entrepreneurs, Ali Yilmaz and Yigit Gurocak. The company’s CEO Yigit Gurocak summarized the last seven years, “Starting from its inception to the present day, obilet.com recorded outstanding growth to reach 400 million visitors, now ranks the top-visited travel site in Turkey.”
The initiative of two entrepreneurs’ dreams, obilet.com currently operates with 160 employees and is expected to maintain its growth in the Turkish travel industry, which reportedly has a size of approximately $15 billion. Yigit Gurocak said that the company aims to sell 18 million tickets in 2020 on obilet.com and the mobile app in Turkey, where 300 million tickets are sold in total.
The Turkish startup to receive highest international funding
According to Startups Watch data, obilet.com stood out as the Turkish startup to receive the highest amount of international funding in 2018 Q2 and when the investment was acquired in November 2019, it was the largest amount of investment of 2019 up until that point. With the participation of EBRD in the latest round, obilet.com has received its fourth investment round in the last five years leading the Turkish technology and travel sectors in this aspect. With this investment, obilet.com raised $10 million within one year.
Named “Europe's Best Travel App” by Mastercard in 2015, obilet.com ranked eighth among the fastest-growing companies listed in the 2017 Deloitte Technology Fast 50 program with a growth rate of 1041%. Most recently, obilet.com was also listed among Turkey’s 100 Fastest Growing Businesses according to the results of a 2019 survey conducted by the Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey (TOBB) and the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey (TEPAV).
To view this piece of content from cts.businesswire.com, please give your consent at the top of this page.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20191212005302/en/
Contact information
Contact Details:
Sena Ozkurt
sena@obilet.com
+905348960414
About Business Wire
For more than 50 years, Business Wire has been the global leader in press release distribution and regulatory disclosure.
Subscribe to releases from Business Wire
Subscribe to all the latest releases from Business Wire by registering your e-mail address below. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Latest releases from Business Wire
83% of Restaurants Are Invisible in AI Search: New Uberall Report Reveals the Discovery Gap Reshaping the Quick Service Restaurant Industry7.5.2026 20:35:00 EEST | Press release
Uberall, the global leader in location marketing technology, today released Fast Food, Faster Discovery: The 2026 GEO Playbook for Multi-Location QSRs — the industry’s first benchmark report measuring how AI assistants recommend restaurants and how multi-location QSR (Quick-Service Restaurant) brands can adapt their local marketing strategies for AI-mediated search. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260507962493/en/ Fast Food, Faster Discovery: Why AI Is the New Drive-Thru The report draws on Uberall’s proprietary GEO Studio benchmark data and aggregated performance metrics from its global QSR customer base. Its central finding: as consumer restaurant discovery rapidly shifts from traditional search to AI assistants, the majority of QSR locations are effectively absent from AI-generated recommendations — at the exact moment AI is becoming consumers’ primary discovery channel. This visibility gap arrives as the Q
Department of Health - Abu Dhabi and ŌURA Partner to Advance Preventive Health in Abu Dhabi7.5.2026 19:57:00 EEST | Press release
Department of Health—Abu Dhabi (DoH) and ŌURA, maker of the world’s leading smart ring, Oura Ring, today announced a joint research programme to study how continuous wearable data can advance preventive health. The collaboration marks the beginning of a long-term partnership to advance Abu Dhabi’s prevention-first, data-driven healthcare agenda, and will initially focus on women’s health and cardiometabolic risk. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260507073495/en/ HE Mansoor Al Mansoori (Left) and Tom Hale (Right) The collaboration builds on Abu Dhabi’s advanced public health infrastructure and longitudinal health data assets, integrating them with ŌURA’s real-time, continuous insights across key health indicators. Together, this creates a strong foundation for understanding health at a population level, enabling the identification of risk factors and supporting a shift from reactive care to more proactive, perso
Rave Sues Apple in Five Countries Over App Store Removal7.5.2026 18:03:00 EEST | Press release
Rave Inc. (“Rave” or the “Company”), the developer and operator of the Rave app, a cross-platform co-viewing “super app” with more than 225 million downloads, today announced that it has filed antitrust lawsuits against Apple in five countries: the United States, Canada, Brazil, the Netherlands and Russia. The lawsuits challenge Apple’s unilateral and anticompetitive decision to remove Rave from its App Store, thereby distorting competition, reducing consumer choice in co-viewing functionalities and increasing the costs to users of switching between iPhone and competing smartphone devices. Rave operates a social entertainment app that allows users in different locations to watch their favorite videos, movies, and TV shows together in real time across multiple operating systems and devices, including iOS, Android, Windows and macOS, and communicate through chat and voice. Rave alleges that this cross-platform experience threatened Apple’s closed iOS ecosystem, which Apple maintains by l
emnify named a Visionary in the 2026 Gartner ® Magic Quadrant™ for Managed IoT Connectivity Services, Worldwide7.5.2026 18:00:00 EEST | Press release
emnify, a global provider of cloud-native IoT connectivity solutions, today announced it has been recognized as a Visionary in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Managed IoT Connectivity Services, Worldwide. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260507642325/en/ emnify named a Visionary in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Managed IoT Connectivity Services, Worldwide. Get the report As a first-time recognized vendor, emnify believes this recognition reflects its forward-looking approach to IoT connectivity, building a platform designed to anticipate where enterprise needs are heading rather than replicating the connectivity models of the past. "We feel being named a Visionary in our first appearance in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ recognizes our deliberate strategy of the last decade: from owning our core network and pioneering satellite-cellular convergence on a single SIM, to embedding fine-tuned AI models
UAE Commits $49bn to Local Manufacturers7.5.2026 17:00:00 EEST | Press release
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) pledged $49 billion in industrial procurement opportunities on Monday and announced plans to localize more than 5,000 products as the Gulf state doubled down on its industrial sovereignty agenda. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260507855698/en/ UAE commits $49bn to local manufacturers (Photo: AETOSWire) Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology, made the announcement at the opening of the fifth edition of Make it in the Emirates, which follows a period that has tested the region. “History remembers the challenges nations face. But it also remembers how nations respond to them and what they build next,” he said. TA’ZIZ announced $40.5 billion worth of agreements aimed at expanding UAE chemical production capacity. The opportunities include offtakes and $2 billion of financing for the UAE’s first world-scale methanol plant. A $270 million National Indust
In our pressroom you can read all our latest releases, find our press contacts, images, documents and other relevant information about us.
Visit our pressroom