Problem
After the 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes, building assessment across eleven provinces took months. Insurance backed up, displacement costs piled up, and residents had no idea when they could go home. The whole system rests on engineer visits, and that's exactly the step that jams under a large event.
Why now
Lab-grade MEMS accelerometers cost a fifth of what they did ten years ago. Dual-radio microcontrollers carrying both Wi-Fi and BLE (ESP32-S3) have reached consumer prices. Public and investor interest in disaster tech in Turkey has never been higher than it's been since 2023. Three years ago none of those three conditions held.
Market
Turkey has roughly twenty million households and about seventy percent of the country sits in a seismic risk zone. Our first target is earthquake-aware homeowners in Istanbul, Izmir and Ankara. The second wave is building managers, insurers and municipalities. The third wave is abroad: Chile, Indonesia, Japan and Mexico.
Product
V1 is a $79 consumer device on Wi-Fi. V1.5 adds microSD and a gyroscope. V2 is the enterprise version with cellular and LoRa. Revenue comes from two lines: device sales and a $5 monthly subscription. At scale we're targeting an LTV/CAC ratio around thirteen times.
Team
An academic advisor with a PhD in earthquake engineering, two MSc civil engineers working on structural health monitoring algorithms and pilot fieldwork, and a founder covering embedded software and cloud. All of us are in Turkey. Academic partnership talks are under way.
Competition
Domestic players (EDIS, Multitek) stay priced at B2B and their mobile experience is weak. Google's free Android earthquake alerts fill the notification space but never touch building health. Grillo started consumer and moved toward the public sector, and the lesson we take from that is clear: consumer hardware alone doesn't stand up. We pair the device with a subscription from day one.
Roadmap
Q2 2026: working prototype with STA/LTA, MQTT and a mobile demo. Q3 2026: five to ten pilot installations and the first real field data. Q4 2026: seed close and company formation. Q1 2027: CE certification and first production run of 1,000 units. Q2 2027: launch and the V1.5 board revision.
Seed round
We're raising the equivalent of $250K, which gives us eighteen months of runway. Allocation: 36% production, 32% team, 12% marketing, 8% certification, 6% cloud, 6% legal and reserve. In parallel we have a TÜBİTAK BiGG application (1.35M TL), KOSGEB programs, and cloud credits from AWS Activate, Google for Startups and Microsoft for Startups.
What we're looking for
Angels and seed funds who have seen a hardware startup before. Partners with access to Turkish regulation, manufacturing and insurance networks are worth more to us than fast money. We share the detailed technical document and the financial model under a confidentiality agreement.