Building a website, setting up payment processing, launching ad campaigns—most small business owners would need three different platforms and a few YouTube tutorials to get through that list. Promake, a Turkish AI startup, thinks you should just be able to ask for it.
The Istanbul-based company announced a $4 million Series A round on June 10, 2026, led by local venture firm 212, with backing from Ak Portföy VC (part of Ak Asset Management GSYF), Arya VC, Gelecek Etki Fonu, JIMCO (Jameel Investment Management Co.), and Maxis Ventures. The raise comes four months after Promake's global debut in February, when it went live with a chat-first platform that lets small businesses build their entire digital infrastructure by talking to an AI assistant.
No dropdown menus. No plugins. Just conversation.
The Premise: Why Click When You Can Chat?
Promake's pitch is deceptively straightforward. Users open a chat window and tell the AI what they need: a domain name, business email, an e-commerce storefront, payment rails, maybe a Google Ads campaign. The system handles the backend assembly work—routing requests, configuring integrations, deploying the infrastructure—while keeping the business owner in a dialogue rather than buried in settings.
It's a bet that the next generation of business software won't look like software at all.
The company was founded in 2025 by a seven-person team that includes CEO Emre Tekin and Sina Afra, an entrepreneur who previously co-founded Markafoni, a Turkish fashion e-commerce site. The rest of the founding lineup—Evren Ballı, Eren Nil, Dinçer Karaduman, Alper Karaer, and Elvan Süzen—brings experience across product, engineering, and operations. Promake is incorporated in Delaware and, according to its LinkedIn profile, currently lists 18 employees.
In May, Google selected the startup for its Accelerator: MENA-T cohort, a signal that the tech giant sees promise in the region's nascent AI ecosystem.
What the Money Will Fund
Tekin said the fresh capital will go toward beefing up Promake's AI infrastructure, expanding the product beyond its initial feature set, growing the headcount, and entering new markets. The company had closed a pre-seed round in December 2025; coverage from February noted a $15 million valuation at that time, though Promake did not confirm that figure.
The startup also landed a strategic partnership and undisclosed investment from Growity in February. A week after launch, Tekin posted on LinkedIn that "thousands of businesses" had already signed up—a claim that hasn't been independently verified, and it's unclear how many of those early users are active versus merely registered.
Still, the early momentum was enough to catch the attention of 212's Kıvanç Aydın, who said his firm invested because Promake reframes digitalization as a natural language operation rather than a technical hurdle. "There are over 500 million small businesses worldwide that don't have dedicated IT teams," Aydın noted. "Making enterprise-grade tools accessible through conversation changes the access equation entirely."
Crowded Space, Different Angle
Promake enters a market that's seen no shortage of innovation—and plenty of established players. Squarespace and Wix have both layered AI-powered site creation into their platforms over the past couple of years. A wave of newer startups has emerged with prompt-based or chat-driven interfaces for web design, many pitching speed and simplicity over customization depth.
What sets Promake apart, at least in theory, is scope. It's not just handling website creation; the platform aims to manage ongoing operations—email, payments, advertising—as a persistent AI teammate rather than a one-time setup wizard. Whether that bundled approach resonates with small business owners, or overwhelms them, remains an open question.
For now, Promake is building in a region where SMBs are digitizing rapidly but often lack the resources or technical fluency that Western markets take for granted. If the chat interface genuinely lowers the barrier, the addressable market is enormous. If it turns out users still want buttons and dashboards when things get complex, well—Promake will have plenty of company pivoting.
The bigger test will come in the next twelve months, as the startup moves from early adopters to mainstream users and competes not just on novelty, but on reliability and results.
