Innovation & Sabancı Holding

At Sabancı Holding, the innovation and transformation process is seen as a funnel that includes Discovery, Ideation, Incubation & Commercialization, and Scale-Up, respectively. These elements are positioned to foster growth and innovation across the Group companies. The innovation and transformation funnel is based on four key stages: X-Lab, X-Teams, the accelerator program Sabancı ARF, and Sabancı Ventures.

X-Lab focuses on establishing an innovative perspective by using design thinking, lean start-up and other innovation-based methods within Sabancı Group companies. Over the past two years, X-Lab has yielded 500 graduates, 10 Ideathon projects and three commercialization projects.

X-Teams verifies the problem area, evaluates scalability, searches and analyzes suitable solution areas/new technologies in order to assess Sabancı Group’s competencies within this framework and to develop a roadmap forward. In the last two-year period, X-Teams has generated 150 ideas with 13 different companies, resulting in 40 projects, 75% MVP and a 23% commercialization rate.

Sabancı ARF (Almost Ready to Fly) is the Group’s early-stage acceleration program. This 20-week program includes seed funding at the outset and a potential follow-on investment on demo day, mentorship, networking and collaboration opportunities with Group companies. Sabancı ARF is designed for selected start-ups (open to both Group companies and external start-ups by application) to help them scale up quickly. The first cohort of this program launched in September 2022 with 14 start-ups accepted to Sabancı ARF.

Sabancı Ventures is the corporate venture capital arm of the Group. As a corporate VC fund, Sabancı Ventures invests in commercialized post-revenue scale-ups and seeks out solid synergies and value creation opportunities for both its investment targets and Sabancı Group companies.

Sabancı Ventures actively evaluates opportunities with innovative business models and/or cutting-edge technologies in burgeoning areas such as internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and big data, climatetech, insurtech, healthtech, fintech, mobility, advanced materials and cloudtech. To date, Sabancı Group has made corporate venture capital investments in 10 companies and deployed up to USD 12 million in three countries. Seven of these companies received investments from Sabancı Ventures in 2022.