[Turkey] Markafoni, the Turkish private shopping club, has raised £4.7 million (11 million Turkish Lira) from Trayas, an investment group whose partners include leading European investors Klaus Hommels and Oliver Jung.
Trayas seems to be focusing on investing in private shopping clubs, having already closed deals in Brazil, Switzerland and India. Of note, Hommels has previously invested in Facebook, Skype and Spotify.
Markafoni is the first and leading private shopping club in Turkey. Its closest competitor is Germany-based B2C giant Otto Group’s limango. There are also newcomers TrendYol.com and Bedava.com.
The company currently has 122 employees and over 870,000 members, CEO Sina Afra tells me. They also operate in Australia under the name BrandsExclusive, which last week raised $5 million from Trayas too.
Moving forward, Afra says the new round will be used to fund further global expansion, with Markafoni planning to set up operations in Greece, Ukraine and South Korea by the end of 2010.
Private shopping clubs are proving a popular business model in Turkey, as they are elsewhere in Europe, and also growing in terms of the economy. As a result, we’ve heard that other European-based startups have their sights set on Turkey and that Spain-based Privalia may be the next player to enter the Turkish market.
