We contribute to our country's development by enabling individuals to bring their savings or idle funds to the economy with the participation finance system, where financial transactions are carried out on an asset-based basis within the framework of interest-free finance rules. At the point we have reached today, the participation finance system is globally accepted as an alternative to the conventional finance system.
As Kuveyt Türk, we have been continuing our efforts for more than 30 years to spread the participation finance system to large masses. At this point, we attach importance to producing solutions that will respond to the needs and demands of entrepreneurs by keeping close relations with the entrepreneurship ecosystem of our country, which has reached a significant level worldwide. We continue to give our best support to young entrepreneurs, especially regarding their financing needs. As a participation finance institution that foresees the importance of digital channels and digital transformation, we initiated this change years ago within our organisation, implemented essential projects in this direction and took timely actions. We strive to support innovative ideas.
Accordingly, we established our Lonca Entrepreneurship Center in 2017 to support and develop new ideas and bring them to the country's economy. We support entrepreneurs with technology-oriented and scalable business ideas through the Lonca to transform their projects into commercial activities with a sustainable model. We care that the entrepreneurs at our centre focus only on their ventures. We help our startups focus on their ideas with the support we provide. Lonca Entrepreneurship Center managed to become one of TÜRKİYE's most effective incubation centres and startup acceleration programs quickly. In about four years, we received a total of over 2 thousand applications on our website www.loncagirisim.com. As a result of our jury's meticulous evaluations, consisting of Kuveyt Türk executives and mentors of the Lonca Entrepreneurship Center, we accepted an average of 10 startups each term to the Lonca. We have graduated 60 startups from Lonca in the past six terms. In the seventh term, in which we are in, we continue to increase our support for our initiatives with our renewed system, increased grant support and investment opportunities. We increased the cash grant support to 50 thousand TL in Lonca. We provide grant support of 10 thousand TL to the startups that are successful in the pre-incubation phase, 15 thousand TL in addition to those accepted to the incubation phase, and an additional 25 thousand TL to the startups that qualify for DemoDay. In addition to all these, we offer pre-seed investment opportunities of up to 25 thousand dollars to startups that have passed the Lonca Scaleup stage. In addition to the grant program, we support our entrepreneurs, such as training, project-based mentoring, and multi-location incubation services. One of the most significant opportunities we provide for our startups is our rich mentor network. As you know, well-structured and correct mentoring for a new venture can make a difference and change the startup's life. Entrepreneurs included in the Lonca receive mentorship support from Kuveyt Türk senior management and employees, as well as industry experts. In addition to mentoring, training and consultancy support, we also support our entrepreneurs in many areas, from law to accounting, from marketing to product development. In addition, we offer many privileges such as R&D support to our device developing entrepreneurs, especially for FinTechs to use our API infrastructure. The opportunity to develop projects with Kuveyt Türk is among the other privileges we offer to our entrepreneurs. Among the startups that graduated from the Lonca Entrepreneurship Center, we design applications that we think will benefit our country, economy, and customers and include them in our business processes. By bringing together the products and services of some startups with our customers, we benefit both parties, becoming a bridge for our startups to reach their potential customers and increasing our service diversity for our customers.
I would also like to state that our Lonca Entrepreneurship Center is accredited as the Implementing Organization for the 1512 Individual Young Entrepreneurship (BIGG) Program, which TÜBİTAK provides non-refundable cash support to entrepreneurs. With TÜBİTAK's BİGG Program, grant support of up to 200 thousand liras is given to young entrepreneurs in order to transform their technology and innovation-oriented business ideas into enterprises with high added value and high-quality employment potential and competitive power on an international scale. Entrepreneurs can benefit from Lonca and Istanbul Technical University Çekirdek during the Lonca BİGG process, which the Lonca carries out within the scope of its cooperation with Technical University Çekirdek. In addition to our contributions to the entrepreneurship ecosystem, as Kuveyt Türk, we have also launched our Fikrinn platform to support innovative ideas. University students, entrepreneurs, individual and corporate customers can submit their innovative ideas on many issues to the Kuveyt Türk Idea Platform. The platform, where the experiences of all Kuveyt Türk customers regarding existing products and services are shared, lays the groundwork for the realisation of their innovative ideas. We are now holding the Ideathon Idea Contest, which we organise for university students, on the Fikrinn Platform. We support the innovative ideas coming through this platform with both monetary rewards and opportunities such as mentoring and training. We think it is valuable to open spaces where especially young people, entrepreneurs and our customers can share their ideas comfortably. We strive to increase our efforts in this direction.
Lonca Girişimcilik Merkezi
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