Kök Projekt’s Istanbul & Ankara Meetups with Some Exciting News

Our new endeavor, the Kök Ventures, debuted with our community! We’re excited to share that we’re working hard to establish our latest initiative, the Kök Ventures Fund! Since 2015, we’ve been working on empowering agri-food, water, and energy tech entrepreneurs across Emerging Markets. This year, we’ve taken a step further to establish our fund to support the startup developing solutions for Climate Change and Food Security solutions within the MENAT Region. 

So, we wanted to share this exciting news with our #KökCommunity, and we’ve kicked off our new event series, the Kök Ventures Meetups, back in January! 

On January 26th, we organized our first Kök Ventures Meetup, hosted by Assembly Ferko Signature Istanbul, and on  March 9th, our second meetup took place in Assembly One Tower in Ankara. In Kök Ventures Meetups, we had the support of our fantastic community partners Egirişim, Endeavor Türkiye, and Cookpad Japan. 

In the first meetup, we focused on Nutrition. As the world changes and the impacts of Climate Change are ever present, nutrition and our access to nutritious food are becoming in danger globally. Nutrition, one of the major topics we focus on in Kök Projekt, is crucial for Food Security. Therefore in this meetup, we’ve done a deep dive into Nutrition and the initiatives to secure it. 

In our second meetup, we broadened our angle and focused on the technologies working on developing solutions for Climate Change. Again, our community came together, featuring a mix of Agri-FoodTech startups, corporate representatives, investors, and experts. In addition, we’ve done a deep dive into the initiatives on ClimateTech and Climate Adaptive initiatives for the Future of Agri-Food Systems.

 

An Urgent Need: Paradigm Shift For Resilient Agrifood Systems

The world population is expected to reach 9,8 billion people in 2050. The big question is how to offer this growing population a sustainable, healthy diet within planetary boundaries. 

Today our food system can not meet the international targets for food waste, hunger, obesity, land protection, and healthy diets. Moreover, the rising population and climate change put even more pressure on food systems. 

Furthermore, The Global Risk Report identifies the ten highest likelihood risks of the next decade; five are related to the environment. With this in mind, at Kök Projekt, we are working for resilient agri-food systems and defined our first meeting topic on Nutrition and the second one on Climate Change. 

 

The Meetups

After briefly introducing Kök Projekt, our CEO, Semi Hakim, shared the details of our upcoming Kök Ventures Fund in his presentation.  Here is more information about our new initiative Kök Ventures:

As Kök Projekt, we’re an agri-food management consulting company that works with corporates, governmental organizations, and investment funds in the food, agriculture, water, and energy sectors.

We have spent the last decade developing our knowledge in these fields. So this year, together with an ever-growing group of like-minded people, we made it our mission to push Kök Projekt to the next level through our knowledge and expertise. With the desire to do better and contribute more to the food and agriculture sector, the idea of the Kök Ventures fund emerged. Kök Ventures, as the investment arm of Kök Projekt, is an agri-food and water technologies sector-focused investment operation designed to invest in early-stage teams solving the challenges within Food Security, Food Safety, and Climate Change. 

Since 2018, Kök Ventures has invested in various in-house ventures focusing on the agri-food sector, and the leading venture of our portfolio is our food incubation center, the Maide Mutfak. As the next phase, Kök Ventures is fundraising and is projected to become operational in 2023, named Kök Ventures Fund I.

Speakers 

In Istanbul, the presentation was followed by Keynotes of our fantastic speakers, Zeynep Sungu, Corporate Marketing and Communication Director at Nestle Türkiye, and Shu Yang Lin, Chief of staff at Cookpad.

In Ankara, the presentation was followed by keynote speeches by our outstanding speakers, Hanzade Sarıçiçek, Deputy Secretary General at Türkiye Technology Development Foundation, and Mehmet Uvez, Deputy Head of Türkiye European Bank of Reconstruction and Development. 

We’re thankful for all of our speakers joining our events and are grateful for the time and effort to share their work and experience on Nutrition and Climate Change. Their enthusiasm was contagious! It was inspiring to listen to such remarks from experts like them.

Also, huge thanks to our location partner Assembly Building for hosting us, as we try to come together for the challenges of our Agri-Food System. 

Finally, a big thank you to everyone who took part in making this event so inspiring and educational! This event brought together outstanding entrepreneurial talent, which makes us thrilled for the Future of Agri-FoodTech Ecosystem in Türkiye.