But when you’re on the other side of it, you’re a bit more relaxed. “Perhaps that’s the difference with the second time I’ve done the Vision Fund $500m round, the IPO. “I wouldn’t raise capital for the sake of raising capital or getting an article about our valuation,” he says. We shouldn’t be as focused on digital natives or young people.”īetterroaming is also selling direct to businesses, enabling them to roll out eSIMs to phones being used by employees through device management tools like Microsoft Intune and JAMF, or to buy a large allocation of data that can be shared between employees.ĭespite taking VC cash last time, Koç isn’t planning on raising outside capital right now, given the company is operating “cashflow positive or break even”. “It’s accessible for people who don’t speak English period. This summer, Betterroaming is offering a one-week, 1GB package for $1.99 to Germans travelling to Turkey for holiday. Koç’s team used AI to translate Betterroaming’s minimalist webpage into multiple languages when Sifted took a look yesterday, there were 32 - from Greek to Latvian. That meant the product has to be easy enough for a Turkish grandma to figure out. “At least for the Turkish community, whenever there is a good solution, people share it by word of mouth.” I saw this as an opportunity to address a pressing issue faced by many, particularly within my community,” he says. It was then that we realised the exorbitant cost of mobile roaming outside the EU, even in neighbouring countries such as Turkey. “Following my parents' retirement and their subsequent move to Turkey, my siblings and I frequently travelled to visit them. Our SIM cards, our pricing, our connection to the internet,” Koç says, comparing Betterroaming to a fintech “having a banking licence and issuing your own cards” while a MVNO without a core network is like a fintech that can only sell a “branded credit card”.īetterroaming lets users buy affordable data packages.īut Koç says he’s not just interested in serving business travellers, and given his family’s Turkish background, he talks a lot about empowering “Turkish grandmothers”. We “basically only the last mile from our customer’s handset to the mobile antennas and from that point on it‘s all us. In other words, it had its own “core network”. Second, while it relied on other telco companies like BT or Orange for antennas, it managed its own data flows. The British company had a few things that made it easy to set up Betterroaming. Koç and Koussios moved in after getting UK government approval. Truphone’s tech was going for cheap for a reason: the UK government had imposed sanctions on oligarch Roman Abramovich and other Russian investors who had backed the company. Koç acquired Truphone’s assets earlier this year with business partner Pyrros Koussios for £1 - yes, one pound - and incorporated them into a new vehicle, TP Global Operations. The eSIM tech was built by a loss-making UK mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), Truphone. The first difference between Betterroaming and Koç’s previous venture: the tech already existed. Buying telco assets from a Russian oligarch But Koç says he wants to go about building a little bit differently this time - and get the help of a few more grandmas.
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