Kapgel, a Turkish on-demand logistics platform, has announced it's closed a $1 million round from Wamda Capital, Addventure, Aslanoba Capital and Turkish angel investor Melih Odemis.

“Turkey is a massive market, with major urban centers like Istanbul and Ankara. They are cosmopolitan, young and urban. Demand for services like Kapgel will continue to grow so long as that is the case in Turkey,” Wamda Capital partner Fares Ghandour told Wamda over the phone.

The word Kapgel is popular Turkish slang for ‘to fetch’. The startup works as a personal assistant by purchasing goods that its users need from near-by merchants, and delivers them in under an hour.

Users are able to order electronics, coffee, food, groceries, choosing from a menu of 30,000 products in more than 2,500 merchants from its iOS or Android apps. They can also put free-text custom orders or chat with an agent within the app for their orders. Kapgel couriers purchase the orders from the point of sale, then deliver to the customer.

Wamda Capital has previously made investments in Turkey with carpooling startup Volt Turkey. Its predecessor MENA Venture Investments (MVI) was an investor in Yemeksepeti.

“Despite the recent events in Turkey, we are confident in the resilience of the Turkish market and we are confident that tech companies will continue to grow, regardless of the political situation,” said Ghandour.

Founded in 2014 by Turkish entrepreneur Cetin Oztoprak, the company has made more than 40,000 deliveries in the last nine months.

They also has merchant programs, for those who want to be featured in Kapgel as ‘exclusive partner’. To be featured on the Kapgel app they simply pay a part of the the service fee.

So far, Kapgel has partnerships with 200 Turkish brands, some of them pioneers in their vertical market such as E-bebek, Turkcell, and Caribou. Recently it signed an exclusive agreement with CarrefourSA, a big grocery chain in Europe. 

Who are the investors?

Melih Odemis is one of the cofounders of Yemeksepeti, the biggest exit in recent Turkish startup history. Since then, he has been an active angel investor. He is part of the Galata Business Angels network and an active mentor on E-tohum, a big incubator and network in Turkey.

His recent investments include Paypad, the first authorized cloud based mobile payment system in Turkey. He has also recently joined to another Aslanoba-backed ecommerce company called BuldumBuldum.

Addventure is a region and stage agnostic international VC, investing in consumer marketplace, on-demand and crowdsourced business.

Vertical-wise it is particularly focused on home and local services, the health tech, food tech and last mile logistics sectors.

It was an investor of Delivery Club, the third largest exit in the consumer internet space in Russia.

Aslanoba Capital is an early stage technology VC fund in Turkey. They invest in teams pursuing disruptive ideas in areas such as marketplaces, ecommerce, mobile, classifieds, content, and SaaS.

Being the most active fund in Turkey, and an early investor of Kapgel, it has invested a total of $71 million in 71 companies in Turkey and overseas.