We Aim For the Top 100 in Exports in 5 Years

The foundations of VeVentures Group of Companies date back to 2011. Having started its activities by offering information and consultancy services to intermediary institutions in Türkiye under the name of Vural Bilişim, the company today offers services to international groups such as QNB and Citigroup in the global arena. With the new companies opened to serve new sectors in the following years, a group of companies has been forming that has started to make a name for itself with its remarkable investments in various fields such as fintech, energy, industrial engineering, informatics, and agriculture. These companies are combined under a community brand and make up the VeVentures Group of Companies.

We had an interview with Nedim Vural, the Founder and Chairman of the Board of these companies, on the establishment of the VeVentures brand and his projections for the future.

Mr. Nedim, could you tell us about yourself?

 I was born in 1987 in Istanbul. I graduated from Sabancı University, School of Management. Following my undergraduate program, I completed my master’s degree in financial management at London Middlesex University, ranking first in the department. I am married and have two children.

Differentiating from our family companies in the construction, hotel, and real estate sectors, I turned to the finance and informatics sectors, which had been my dream. For this reason, I started my business life by establishing my first company at the age of 23. Since then, we have kept expanding our investments by taking various steps and setting our targets high.

Could you also tell us about the establishment of VeVentures and the fields of activity of your companies?

 We started our activities in 2011 with only 2 of my teammates. We had been providing consultancy services for brokerage houses to reach depositors who wanted to make new investments through digital channels. Back then, it was more difficult for financial companies to manage their customer portfolio compared to today’s technology. In addition, financial institutions had to keep their infrastructure and content up-to-date in order to reach micro-investors globally. At this point, we have made productive cooperation with the right partners and the organizations we work with. Today, we offer services to many international banks and financial institutions globally in this company. Then we started to use our income in various business areas. First, in the field of energy, followed by fintech, agriculture and other fields, with Vemarine, Vepara, 11industry and Vetarım companies, we have become a group of companies that employ more than 250 people in Türkiye and abroad, received an export honour award, and are eager to invest in new areas as well.

Considering your young age, can we say that you are working on next-generation business models?

I can say that we can conduct the trend studies or projects of the future or today, or we can get innovative business opportunities from them but the definition of the right investment is not to ignore the criterion of acting rational.

I believe that the way to take steps in the right sectors is to read the data correctly, not break away from the facts, and feed your projections through the right sources.

Let us talk about Vepara as well. As you mentioned, the initiatives of both the start-up ecosystem and international investment companies in terms of fintech have reached significant numbers. What are you aiming for as Vepara? 

Vepara is a process that we started at the end of 2020. We have a paid-in capital of over TRY 30 million in this company. As you know, the licensing processes in this field continue within the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye. We have been completing our preparations in line with the legislation in order to obtain our license.

In brief, Vepara is a company that offers virtual POS, money transfer and wallet services to the end-user. But here, we will combine the experience and network we have gained in our other companies and reveal a visionary infrastructure. For example, we will bring the wallet owner together with investment through intermediary institutions and offer software developments on the website of the virtual POS owner. In the project phase of Vepara, we made the right moves in infrastructure investments as well as being very meticulous in all other matters, we established teams of experts in their fields. As we have been offering consultancy, marketing, and financial technology services to financial technology services to financial institutions for years, this field contributes to our inter-company ecosystem. 

What is your prediction about the future and structure of the company?

In the next 5 years, we aim to combine all our companies and partnerships under a single legal entity and to be among the top 100 companies in Türkiye in terms of exports.

In order to achieve this goal, we, as VeVentures, have updated both our previous investments and our corporate structure in the last two years. We have structured the organizational structure, business planning and corporate equipment of all our companies before taking our new steps. We have carried out detailed studies in many areas from occupational safety practices to human resource planning. We paid attention to reallizing all these by taking into account the world standards. Prior to our new investments, we updated our company policies and methods of doing business in line with both our own corporate understanding and the requirements of the sectors in which we are active. We mapped out the principles and objectives on a chart applicable to all our companies. The harvest we reaped as a result of these institutional structure studies allows us to look to the future with hope in terms of reaching our goal.

How do you choose your new investment areas? How do you perceive new start-up ideas?

 The world is going through a process of globalization and therefore today, a next-generation company, which was founded just 3 years ago, has the opportunity to get ahead of 30-year-old traditional companies. Start-ups of 100 people established in Silicon Valley are able to defy the world’s largest industrial giants, so to speak. For this reason, I would like to state that we are always open to start-ups. We already have various investments and partnerships in these areas.

As VeVentures, we have established a start-up evaluation mechanism. We perceive this evaluation process as a company policy. We have developed a corporate sensitivity in terms of having start-ups reach finance and turning ideas into values. I would like to announce that our fellow entrepreneurs can reach us via our website.