Turkey is moving towards creating its own sovereign artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure to support domestic businesses without relying on foreign technology.
Mehmet Uner, strategic advisor at Ena Venture Capital, said the fund wants to make Turkey’s sovereign AI a major investor in early-stage AI startups in the country, The Caspian post reports, citing Anadolu Agency.
Uner, speaking on the sidelines of the Take Off Istanbul 2025 startup event, said the fund invests in startups operating in AIcloud computing and cybersecurity. The fund is involved in pre-seed and seed startups.
“We are participating in Take Off Istanbul with four companies,” he said. “Orbina operates in the field of agentic AI, Enlighty works on customer and market insight, MagicPay develops a payment processing system and CloudFlex stands out with its hybrid cloud computing infrastructure.
Uner said that Orbina, in particular, has carried out large projects, especially in the financial sectors of insurers and banks, as well as in the public sector. “It’s one of our investments that we’re proud of,” he said.
He noted that Orbina offers advantages to institutions in terms of efficiency.
“Orbina’s offerings allow them to work more efficiently by automating tasks,” he said. “One of the most important features of Orbina is that it has developed a Large Turkish Language Model (LLM), allowing users to produce AI agents that best speak our language and provide the best assistance.”
Uner said another investment from Ena Venture Capital is Nuvena, a company working to establish Turkey’s sovereign AI infrastructure.
“What we noticed when creating the investment fund is that all the AI startups we invest in are unfortunately facing infrastructure needs – they are trying to bridge the gap outside of Turkey, so we said: ‘Let’s invest in Turkey and create our own sovereign AI infrastructure,’ because that way our startups can use it as a base instead of looking abroad,” he said. “And we want to achieve this goal with Nuvena.”
Uner noted that the goal of the Nuvena investment is to create data center capacity in Türkiye and build an AI layer on top.
“Through our sovereign AI layer, we want Turkish companies and startups to meet their capacity and hardware needs from within our country rather than from foreign solutions,” he added.