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Top 30 ESports Angel Investors in Middle East in January 2025

Last updated: Jan 2025 A list of 30 angel investors that invest in Esports startups based in Middle east. We rank investors based on the number of investments they made in Esports companies from Middle east. We update this investor list every month.

Top 30 ESports Angel Investors in Middle East in January 2025

Investor	eSports Middle East investments
Kushal Shah	3
Sertaç Özinal	2
Fethi Ahmet Özbulut	1
Ercan Ergül	1
Rıfat Elhadef	1
Can Hicbezmez	1
Erdem Gezer	1
Kaan Kayabalı	1
Nevzat Aydın	1
İrfan Ündevli	1
Mustafa Emre Gündüz	1
Alexander Abramyan	1
Barbaros Özbugutu	1
Brad Kotansky	1
Marc Merrill	1
Semiramis Kulak	1
Dylan Collins	1
Barış Before	1
Selin Kiper	1
Kaan Kural	1
Orkun Saitoğlu	1
Gizem Nilay Tuna	1
Sercan Akkaş	1
Khalid AlTawil	1
Sina Afra	1
Kaan Kalıpçı	1
Cem Büyükkaya	1
Emre Gerçek	1
Demirhan Büyüközcü	1
Kaan Karapınar	1

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Investor list

Kushal Shah is a Senior Partner at Roland Berger's Dubai office and a Managing Partner for the Middle East. Prior to joining Roland Berger, he spent 12 years with a leading consultancy in London and Dubai. He studied Economics at Cambridge in the UK and he is a certified Chartered Accountant.

Investment focus

eSports, Video, Gaming
Seed, Series B
Egypt, United States, United Arab Emirates

Portfolio highlights

GBarena — GBarena is an online esports platform that serves the ecosystem stakeholders by the combination of a strong network of different esports communities, and a highly analytical tool to provide authentic value for all stakeholders (Publishers, Gamers, Tournament Organizers, Sponsors, Teams, and Media Partners).
LabLabee — Gain practical expertise in the most in-demand Telco Cloud technologies with instantly set up labs.
YaLLa esports — YaLLa Esports was born out of a passion for gaming shared by friends, which ignited a mission to build a community of gamers with an organized structure in the MENA region, championing the gaming culture and building the perfect environment for professional gamers to flourish. We aim to position ourselves as a supportive hub for gamers of alllevels with a future vision of constructing and managing the very best teams in the region, competing on a global scale and showcasing the Middle Eastern & African talent in the international gaming stratosphere.

Sertaç Özinal

Investment focus

Internet, Gaming, FinTech
Seed, Angel, Pre-Seed
Turkey

Portfolio highlights

Artiox — Artiox is an investment company in METU Technopolis Area.
Scoutli — VALORANT Esports Matches, events, stats, and analytics
Fon Radar — Fon Radar is an online marketplace platform that brings businesses together with financial institutions.

Fethi Ahmet Özbulut

Investment focus

Gaming, eSports, Fantasy Sports
Pre-Seed
Turkey

Portfolio highlights

Scoutli — VALORANT Esports Matches, events, stats, and analytics

Ercan Ergül is a Managing Director with SEAF, the manager of Southeast Europe Equity Fund II, L.P. (“SEEF”), a US$320 million private equity fund with investments in Turkey, Albania and Kosovo. Ercan is also a board member of Global Investment Holding, a listed investment group based in İstanbul with operations in ports, energy and financialservices. Prior to joining SEAF, he spent his career as a private equity and investment banking professional and began his career in the corporate credit group of Citibank in Turkey. Ercan received his undergraduate degree from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, and a Masters of Business Administration with concentration in Finance from the University of Florida.

Investment focus

Soccer, Sports, eSports
Series A
Turkey

Portfolio highlights

Scoutium — Scoutium is a technology company that provides a unique motivation for all players, clubs and federations around the world. Scoutium has ten thousands of analyses of football players from Germany, Poland and Turkey in its database. With tens of partner clubs, Scoutium is able to access hundreds of cities, towns, and villages in the countries withmore than hundreds video experts and scouts. We aim to democratise football by opening up young players' horizons and giving opportunities to players to be discovered. With Scoutium, licensed football players can improve themselves with exclusively created overview videos, analyses from professional scouts, and special training programs, and can be discovered by clubs with regards to these videos & analyses. Football fans can earn money by recording 90-minute videos or making player analyses and have the chance to pursue a professional scouting career. Thanks to our technology, clubs can access to our database formed by match recordings and scouting analyses.Until today, Scoutium has raised 2.5M$. With projects in Machine Learning and Data Science, Scoutium has become an ITU Teknokent company in 2018.With the mission of enabling all players around the world to be discovered, Scoutium’s goal is to change the game forever. For more, please visit scoutium.com or download our app from Google Play & App Store.

Rıfat Elhadef

Investment focus

eSports, Video Games, Social Media
Angel
Turkey

Portfolio highlights

Playz — Playz is a social media platform for gamers.

Can Hicbezmez

Investment focus

Gaming, eSports, Fantasy Sports
Pre-Seed
Turkey

Portfolio highlights

Scoutli — VALORANT Esports Matches, events, stats, and analytics

Erdem Gezer

Investment focus

eSports, Video Games, Social Media
Seed, Angel
Turkey

Portfolio highlights

Playz — Playz is a social media platform for gamers.
Git Kargo —

Kaan Kayabali, a Turkish entrepreneur, is the founder and CEO of Onedio Media and Internet Services Inc.

Investment focus

eSports, Video Games, Social Media
Seed, Angel
Turkey

Portfolio highlights

Playz — Playz is a social media platform for gamers.
Wudya —

Nevzat Aydın is the CEO of Yemeksepeti.com, the first and biggest online food delivery portal in Turkey.Born in 1976 in İstanbul, Nevzat Aydın completed his secondary education at the Bursa Anatolian High School. Following his graduation from Boğaziçi University Department of Computer Engineering, he went to the United States where he receivedhis MBA at the University of San Francisco in Silicon Valley.During his stay in the United States, Aydın followed the latest developments on e-trade before he returned to Turkey in 2000 to launch his project, Yemeksepeti.com. Serving as the CEO of Yemeksepeti.com, Nevzat Aydın introduced a brand new dimension to e-trade in Turkey.In 2007, Yemeksepeti.com was selected the “Endeavor Entreprenur” by Endeavor Turkey. Aydin was also selected the “Most Successful Turkish Young Entrepreneur” by the CNBC-e Business magazine in 2010 for his successful work since the foundation of Yemeksepeti.com.As the founder and CEO of Yemeksepeti.com, which celebrated its 11th anniversary in 2012, he won the first prize in 2011 in the “Male Entrepreneur of the Year” category at the “Businesspeople of the Year” survey conducted by the Ekonomist magazine among nearly 3,000 business people.Aydin is a member of the Young Entrepreneurs Supreme Board of the Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey, and a founding member of Galata Business Angels.Aydın was one of the 150 entrepreneurs invited from all over the world to the Entrepreneurship Summit held by US President Barack Obama on April 26-27, 2010.He was also among the speakers at the DLD (Digital-Life-Design) Conference, which is deemed as one of the world's most prestigious conferences with its content on innovation and developments in the digital world. He is also an editorial advisor of GQ Turkey, one of the 5 “dragons” of the Dragons’ Den Turkey show, and a Board Member of Trabzonspor sports club.

Investment focus

Internet, Software, E-Commerce
Seed, Angel, Funding Round
Turkey, United States, United Kingdom

Portfolio highlights

Getmobil — Getmobill offers services in refurbished devices and their sale and resale.
Apollo IoT — One of Turkey's digital energy platform initiatives is Apollo IoT. This platform is intended for invoice control, optimization, and forecasting. It allows you to monitor historical and current consumption data and confirm the correctness of your electricity bill, all without the need for device or hardware installation. Apollo assists inlowering the cost of electricity usage by providing real-time verification, detecting anomalous consumption and reactive fines in real-time, and informing you with enhanced warnings. It makes energy monitoring of corporate employees more realistic, saves money by boosting energy efficiency, and protects the environment thanks to its user-friendly web-based interface and excellent graphics.
Shark Guitar — Shark Guitar sells innovative electric guitars.

İrfan Ündevli

Investment focus

Gaming, eSports, Fantasy Sports
Pre-Seed
Turkey

Portfolio highlights

Scoutli — VALORANT Esports Matches, events, stats, and analytics

Mustafa Emre Gündüz

Investment focus

Gaming, eSports, Fantasy Sports
Pre-Seed
Turkey

Portfolio highlights

Scoutli — VALORANT Esports Matches, events, stats, and analytics

Alexander Abramyan

Investment focus

Gaming, eSports, Mobile Apps
Angel
United Arab Emirates

Portfolio highlights

Fotrum — Fotrum: Empowering Mobile Gamers through Competitive GamingHave you ever wondered why PC games like Dota 2 and Counter-Strike remain incredibly popular for years, while many competitive mobile games struggle to maintain traction over time, even in the most successful regions? The secret sauce lies in community-driven activities. Just take a lookat CS:GO, where the community plays on platforms like Faceit, hosts tournaments, and fosters the growth of esports.Introducing Fotrum, the all-in-one ecosystem designed specifically for the mobile gaming market. At Fotrum, we've tackled the user retention challenges faced by mobile game publishers head-on by offering real competition and growth opportunities to mobile gamers on our innovative competitive platform.One of the major hurdles we've addressed is the lack of APIs provided by mobile game publishers. We've developed special bots that revolutionize the gaming experience. These bots are capable of creating lobbies, inviting players, initiating games, collecting in-game statistics, and much more. By bridging this technological gap, we ensure a seamless and enriched gaming experience for our users.But that's not all. Fotrum also provides an advanced toolkit tailored to esports organizations. Our toolkit includes an automated tournament system that simplifies the hosting of qualifications through our bot system, a targeting system to help teams find skilled players, and native integrations for tournament organizations, allowing for monetization opportunities.Fotrum has also played a pivotal role in creating the esports market for Standoff 2 in the CIS region. By providing a dedicated platform for competitive play, Fotrum has cultivated a thriving community of Standoff 2 enthusiasts, offering them a place to showcase their skills, compete in tournaments, and elevate the esports scene in the region.Currently, Fotrum supports popular games such as Standoff 2, PUBG Mobile, and Brawl Stars, with plans to expand our list of supported games in the near future. Mobile Legends will be added to our platform within a couple of months, further diversifying the gaming options available to our users.Behind Fotrum's success is a team of 15 highly experienced individuals in the game industry and software engineering. Our team brings invaluable expertise from some of the largest fintech companies, ensuring that Fotrum operates at the cutting edge of technology and gaming.Join the Fotrum community today and unlock the true potential of mobile gaming. Experience our advanced matchmaking system, access to tournaments, esports team system, comprehensive statistics, and game analysis. With Fotrum, mobile gamers can finally embark on a journey of growth, competition, and success.

Barbaros Serdar Özbugutu worked for FIRSTDATA, and later moved to KLARNA. In 2013, he officially launched Iyzico with his Co-Founder Tahsin Isin. Iyzico is transforming the payment processing experience for businesses through its bank-integrated, fraud-protected payment platform tailored to the nuances of the Turkish market.(https://www.iyzico.com/en)

Investment focus

Retail, Soccer, Sports
Seed, Pre-Seed, Series A
Turkey, United States

Portfolio highlights

Fuudy — Fuudy is a new Food ordering app
Crait.it — Empowering your eComm and marketing visuals with power of AI creativity and actionable data insight.
Swipeline — 119K Followers, 207 Following, 1,461 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Swipeline TR (@swipeline_tr)

Brad Kotansky has always been a serial investor: while pursuing his undergraduate BComm degree at McGill University, Brad was a member of the finance club and interned at ScotiaMcLeod for a wealth advisor; upon graduation, his passion for investing led him to Wall Street where he spent over a decade working as an investment banker, and later as ananalyst and portfolio manager for various hedge funds; in 2012, he founded Prickly Pear Ventures, a real estate development firm in Phoenix, Arizona, to capture opportunities from fallout of the Real Estate crisis of 2009 (the portfolio of single-family homes he amassed was ultimately sold to ARPI, a publicly traded REIT in 2013). To this day, Brad continues to be very active in the angel and seed investing world having invested in companies such as Coupang, Synchtank, Playsight, New Hive and Jingle Punks. But one thing Brad had always wanted to do was start and operate a business of his own. Ari’s business plan was tweaked, and together the pair embarked on a search for a technical founder.

Investment focus

E-Commerce, Internet, News
Series A, Seed, Series B
United States, Israel, South Korea

Portfolio highlights

Coupang — Coupang offers an e-commerce platform that is powered by innovative technology and operations. It offers its customers possible prices and product selection within a convenient and personalized shopping environment.Powered by technology and operations, Coupang has set out to transform the end-to-end customer experience from revolutionizinglast-mile delivery to rethinking how Customers search and discover on a truly mobile-first platform. It was founded in 2010 and headquartered in Seoul, Seoul-t'ukpyolsi.
NewHive — New Hive is the blank canvas of the web. It's mission is to encourage creative expression online.
PlaySight Interactive — Connecting the next generation of athletes with a cutting-edge video and analysis tools for any sport at any level. Discover the PlaySight SmartCourt and platform

Marc Merrill Co-founded of Riot Games, Inc. in 2006 and serves as its President. Marc Merrill served as Chief Marketing Officer of Riot Games, Inc. He was corporate marketing executive in the exciting world of Business-to-Business media at Advanstar Communications. He has marketing, leadership, and elite gaming skills including Schedule Mastery +9.He held roles in finance with Merrill Lynch and US Bancorp.

Investment focus

Media and Entertainment, Gaming, Video Games
Seed, Funding Round, Series A
United States, Israel, Norway

Portfolio highlights

Anzu.io — Anzu is an in-game advertising platform that introduces native, creative, and dynamically-updated ads to video games and esports.
OpenBCI — OpenBCI is a low-cost, programmable, open-source EEG platform that gives anybody with computer access to their brain waves. Their vision is to realize the potential of the open-source movement to accelerate innovation in brain science through collaborative hardware and software development. Behind the many lines of code and circuit diagrams,OpenBCI has a growing community of scientists, engineers, designers, makers, and a whole bunch of other people who are interested in furthering our understanding of the brain. We feel that the biggest challenges in understanding what makes us who we are cannot be solved by a company, an institution, or even an entire field of science. Rather, we believe these discoveries will be made through an open forum of shared knowledge and concerted effort by people from many different disciplines. Today, the leading brain-computer interface (BCI) companies distribute fixed devices with limited or closed access to the algorithms that translate raw EEG signals to meaningful data. These devices are powerful and effective for application development but not ideal for R&D requiring adjustable hardware setups and direct control over the signal processing techniques. OpenBCI is fully accessible and powered by an open-source community of hardware and software builders, making it easy for creators of any skill level and ideal for researchers who haven’t yet settled on the perfect system design. The OpenBCI platform is intended to serve as a malleable starting point in the rapidly growing field of brain-computer interfacing.
Fast Break Labs — Fast Break Labs is an early-stage, venture-backed startup that's building the future of sports gaming and entertainment.

Semiramis Kulak

Investment focus

Gaming, eSports, Fantasy Sports
Seed, Pre-Seed, Funding Round
Turkey

Portfolio highlights

Aposto — All-in-one media service currently based in Istanbul, Turkey.
Scoutli — VALORANT Esports Matches, events, stats, and analytics

Dylan Collins is one of Europe’s most experienced digital media entrepreneurs, focusing on games, kids entertainment and the technology which underpins them.He is CEO of SuperAwesome, the #1 kid-safe brand engagement platform. SuperAwesome works with the biggest kids entertainment brands in the world including Disney, Hasbro, Warner Bros andActivision ensuring they connect safely with over a quarter of a billion kids each month.An active investor and advisor across both kids media and technology companies, he is Venture Partner with Hoxton Ventures and sits on the board of the UK’s top-rated marketing technology agency, Potato and Brown Bag Films, Europe’s leading kids animation studio. Previously Collins founded Jolt Online Gaming which became one of the pioneering social games publishers in Europe. Jolt was acquired by GameStop (NYSE: GME), the largest video games retailer in the world in 2009 to spearhead their digital media strategy.As founder and CEO of DemonWare in 2003, he led the company to become the leading online games technology firm in the global console games market. In 2007, DemonWare was acquired by Activision Blizzard (NYSE: ATVI), the world’s biggest video games publisher and is now the multiplayer backbone of the billion-dollar Call of Duty franchise.

Investment focus

eSports, Advertising, Video Games
Series A
Israel

Portfolio highlights

Anzu.io — Anzu is an in-game advertising platform that introduces native, creative, and dynamically-updated ads to video games and esports.

Barış Before

Investment focus

eSports, Video Games, Social Media
Angel
Turkey

Portfolio highlights

Playz — Playz is a social media platform for gamers.

Selin Kiper

Investment focus

Soccer, Sports, eSports
Series A
Turkey

Portfolio highlights

Scoutium — Scoutium is a technology company that provides a unique motivation for all players, clubs and federations around the world. Scoutium has ten thousands of analyses of football players from Germany, Poland and Turkey in its database. With tens of partner clubs, Scoutium is able to access hundreds of cities, towns, and villages in the countries withmore than hundreds video experts and scouts. We aim to democratise football by opening up young players' horizons and giving opportunities to players to be discovered. With Scoutium, licensed football players can improve themselves with exclusively created overview videos, analyses from professional scouts, and special training programs, and can be discovered by clubs with regards to these videos & analyses. Football fans can earn money by recording 90-minute videos or making player analyses and have the chance to pursue a professional scouting career. Thanks to our technology, clubs can access to our database formed by match recordings and scouting analyses.Until today, Scoutium has raised 2.5M$. With projects in Machine Learning and Data Science, Scoutium has become an ITU Teknokent company in 2018.With the mission of enabling all players around the world to be discovered, Scoutium’s goal is to change the game forever. For more, please visit scoutium.com or download our app from Google Play & App Store.

Kaan Kural

Investment focus

eSports, Video Games, Social Media
Angel
Turkey

Portfolio highlights

Playz — Playz is a social media platform for gamers.

Born in Istanbul in 1982, Orkun Saitoğlu graduated from Galatasaray High School and then studied Computer Engineering at Montpellier University and completed his master's degree at Paris Pierre-Marie Curie University in Paris. In the second year of his graduate study, he became part of the team of B2B, B2C sites in the TUI group and startedhis career as a Software Engineer. During the first years of his career, he supported the design and integration of PayPal solution in France and the Benelux and later on became a part of business development and sales team during Scandinavian, Turkish, Middle Eastern and Russian market expansion. Orkun, later on became a part of a global team managing PayPal’s relationship with startups against Stripe and Braintree competition. In 2014, after living abroad for 14 years he decided to move back to Turkey to establish his own startup company. It is during this period that Orkun met with iyzico’s co-founders Barbaros Özbuğutu and Tahsin Isın to become the COO of iyzico knowing that the company would emerge as the payment champion of the region. Orkun is currently in charge of all of iyzico’s sales, marketing and operations teams.

Investment focus

Soccer, Sports, eSports
Series A
Turkey

Portfolio highlights

Scoutium — Scoutium is a technology company that provides a unique motivation for all players, clubs and federations around the world. Scoutium has ten thousands of analyses of football players from Germany, Poland and Turkey in its database. With tens of partner clubs, Scoutium is able to access hundreds of cities, towns, and villages in the countries withmore than hundreds video experts and scouts. We aim to democratise football by opening up young players' horizons and giving opportunities to players to be discovered. With Scoutium, licensed football players can improve themselves with exclusively created overview videos, analyses from professional scouts, and special training programs, and can be discovered by clubs with regards to these videos & analyses. Football fans can earn money by recording 90-minute videos or making player analyses and have the chance to pursue a professional scouting career. Thanks to our technology, clubs can access to our database formed by match recordings and scouting analyses.Until today, Scoutium has raised 2.5M$. With projects in Machine Learning and Data Science, Scoutium has become an ITU Teknokent company in 2018.With the mission of enabling all players around the world to be discovered, Scoutium’s goal is to change the game forever. For more, please visit scoutium.com or download our app from Google Play & App Store.

Gizem Nilay Tuna

Investment focus

Gaming, eSports, Fantasy Sports
Pre-Seed
Turkey

Portfolio highlights

Scoutli — VALORANT Esports Matches, events, stats, and analytics

Sercan Akkas serves as Product Director at Yemeksepeti.

Investment focus

Apps, SaaS, Fruit
Seed, Pre-Seed
Turkey

Portfolio highlights

Lugath — Lugath automates content localization with the power of AI translation.
Kidolog — Kidolog provides support to parents with video or messaging on issues they may need about pre-pregnancy and post-pregnancy.
Scoutli — VALORANT Esports Matches, events, stats, and analytics

Khalid AlTawil is a Board Member at Saudi Chemcial Company.

Investment focus

Gaming, eSports, Rental
Seed
Egypt, India, United Arab Emirates

Portfolio highlights

Rooter — Rooter is an Indian game streaming platform that organizes multiple esports tournaments and owns many gaming IPs. It focuses on the massive mobile gaming market of more than 350 mn gamers. Conceptualized in 2016, Rooter was initially set up by Piyush and Dipesh Agarwal to build a strong community of sports fans around the world. But soon afterthe outbreak of COVID-19, Rooter forayed into game streaming to build one of the country’s biggest communities of gamers as well. Rooter has reached out to more than 23 mn users with an average user watching Live game streams daily for 26 mins. Rooter also runs the biggest community program to build the next million game streamers in India. Today Rooter is the biggest streaming platform in India available across Android, iOS, and Desktop.
GBarena — GBarena is an online esports platform that serves the ecosystem stakeholders by the combination of a strong network of different esports communities, and a highly analytical tool to provide authentic value for all stakeholders (Publishers, Gamers, Tournament Organizers, Sponsors, Teams, and Media Partners).
RentSher Middle East — UAE Listings and Directories for Vape and Tobacco Shop in UAE

Sina Afra is the CEO and Founder of Tiko. He previously worked at Markafoni as a CEO and Founder. Sina Afra attended the University of Münster.

Investment focus

E-Commerce, Fashion, Internet
Seed, Series A, Angel
Turkey, United States, Germany

Portfolio highlights

Vagon — Vagon is your personal high-performance computer on the cloud. Start Vagon instantly and run all challenging software from any device, anywhere.
MARS — MARS provides digital financial services with unique card options and rewards programs.
Firefly — Firefly is the next-gen car advertising solution, featuring taxi and rideshare top advertising, in-car advertising, holograms, car wraps and more.

Kaan Kalıpçı

Investment focus

Recipes, eSports, Delivery
Seed, Angel
Turkey

Portfolio highlights

Playz — Playz is a social media platform for gamers.
Bundle Kitchen — Bundle Kitchen App for Members Exclusive to the Campaign, Take Advantage of Benefits and Place an Order. Please submit.

Cem Büyükkaya

Investment focus