Noah Johnson
Nov 16, 2023
Following a recent deal with Spain's Beka Finance SV SA, Turkey's Papara has become the country's first fintech startup to reach the status of a unicorn, Bloomberg reported.
In exchange for the acquisition of Papara’s Spanish rival Rebellion, which offers mobile banking services such as money transfers, prepaid cards and cash-back, Beka last week received an undisclosed amount of cash and shares in the Istanbul-based firm.
Referring to a tech startup with a valuation of over $1 billion, Papara founder Ahmed Karsli, in a phone interview, said: “When we gave Beka Finance our shares, they became our shareholders at a price level that valued our company at unicorn level.”
It should be noted that after a global slump in valuations of global tech assets reached Turkey, Papara’s unicorn status holds a lot of significance.
According to data from startups, venture capitalists only invested about $111 million in Turkish assets during the first half of this year. This compares to the boom years of 2021 and 2022 when investments in Turkish startups reached $1.9 billion and $1.4 billion, respectively.
Papara — founded in 2016 as an electronic payments firm — was growing only on its equity until Beka Finance joined as a partner, according to Birce Ciravoglu, Papara’s M&A and expansion director. This year, it expanded its product offerings beyond core banking services to include pet, home, travel, and mobile insurance.
“Papara is the first fintech unicorn startup out of Turkey,” she said in a phone interview. “It has also become one of the leading fintech firms in Europe with 16 million active individual and corporate users,” she said. “I am so excited about this fact.”
The company is in advanced negotiations to buy another European neobank, Ciravoglu said. “Then we can share with the public the exact amount of our valuation,” she said.
