Demet Mutlu
The story
Demet Mutlu started an MBA at Harvard Business School in 2009. On a summer trip home to Istanbul she saw that Turkey had a young population and a large fashion manufacturing industry, yet little of it was sold online. She left Harvard to build an online retailer herself, and her father did not speak to her for two months. She sold her apartment for $300,000 to fund Trendyol, launched in 2010 and run at first from her kitchen table with a handful of staff and one delivery van. Backed by Tiger Global and Kleiner Perkins, she became one of the first women in Turkey to raise venture capital at that scale. Because few people in the country had done e-commerce, she had to build the team from scratch, and the company took four years to turn a profit. Her riskiest move was to switch from reselling brands to making Trendyol's own fashion. Alibaba took a majority stake in 2018, and in 2021 Trendyol raised $1.5 billion at a $16.5 billion valuation.
By the numbers
On Founding MENA
