Message from the Chairman of the Board

Dear Entrepreneurs, and Members of Yıldız,

First of all, I hope that the institutional profile we have created to provide information on YTU Yıldız Technopark, which has benefited not only our nation but the entire world in terms of economy, the environment, and social development, would be helpful to our readers.

We, as engineers, are people who are precise in their objectives.

Personally, I've always believed that the more precise the objective and direction are, the more agile it will be to plan and control the process.

For this reason, I think it would be best to state our objective for YTU Yıldız Technopark at the beginning of the letter. Our objective is to launch our first unicorn start-up in three years!

We have been aware of the power of our country to launch unicorns for a long time. The start-ups in the YTU Yıldız Technopark expand their global reach day by day, and I have no doubt that these successes will accelerate the birth of international unicorns who will open to foreign countries very soon. In order to lead such success, we, at YTU Yıldız Technopark, continue to work and produce with greater enthusiasm every day.

Again, when we set our goals as engineers, we use the data we have. When you take the achievements of YTU Yıldız Technopark since the day it was founded, the innovations it has implemented, its agile structure, and most importantly, its human value, as the data, you can see that this objective is one that this objective will be revised and advanced further.

YTU Yıldız Technopark is here to meet with solutions that add value to new ideas and to look at R&D and innovation from an entirely new angle.

YTU Yıldız Technopark hosted projects and initiatives that will carry both our country and Yıldız Technical University to the future in 2021 and achieved a turnover of nearly TRY 200 million. Among our incubation start-ups, Bioli, which produces bioplastic from olive pits, received an investment of USD 30 million valuation; Thread in Motion, operating in the field of wearable technology, of TRY 100 million, MentalUp; an academic startup that develops games that support the cognitive development of children aged 4-13, of USD 25 million; HUBBOX, working on the remote control and management technologies of automation systems, of TRY 6 million; Ekmob, a sales automation application, of TRY 25 million; and Pixa Software, an e-commerce software platform, of TRY 6.2 million. While we are very happy with these accomplishments, we are also eager to host many more with a variety of opportunities.

Our Technology Design Office, Yıldız Incubation, Prototype Workshop, StarCamp and many other departments, which help our academicians to transform the patents they have developed at our university into innovation, also carried out very important studies as well.

Yıldız Incubation, which discovers the country's talented entrepreneurs while they are at the incubation stage and supports them in every way to develop a successful company structure, is currently the most invested incubation center in Turkey. Within this great responsibility, entrepreneurs participating in the accelerators carried out at Yıldız Incubation Center with this great responsibility continue to benefit from many opportunities such as specially designed training in different sectors, open and closed office opportunities, one-to-one academic and technical mentoring sessions, consultancy on access to advanced R&D funds and other financing sources, potential customer and investor meetings, and prototype manufacturing provided free of charge for startups to produce their first products.

Whether you call it a science park as it is commonly used in the UK, a research park as the Americans call it, or a technopark as we call it, technology development zones have a great impact on all of our lives in the entrepreneurial university model of the 21st century. Behind many solutions that make our lives easier today are the approaches, technologies and innovations developed in these zones. We are delighted to host academicians, entrepreneurs, companies and institutions who want to shape the future and make a positive difference in the lives of all of us, at YTU Yıldız Technopark, an international innovation center that facilitates transformation of new ideas into added value.

Best regards,

Prof. Dr. Tamer Yılmaz

Chairman of the Board of YTU Yıldız Technopark

Rector of YTU