Early Believers

Backing builders who ship before they ask permission.

Ilhanli Ventures is my early-stage investing practice, and it is still being built. There is no fund yet. For now I learn by doing: I study real deals, talk with founders, and build things myself.

What I'm drawn to

Focus
Hard tech

Infrastructure hiding in plain sight

Boring physical systems, like roads, grids and machines, that are one clever mechanism away from creating value nobody is collecting yet.

People

Founders who build before they pitch

I trust a working prototype more than a polished deck. The best signal I've found is someone who already shipped the ugly first version.

Timing

Deals nobody has dressed up yet

The best opportunities rarely look exciting at first. I look at the unglamorous ideas early, before they become obvious to everyone.

About

Muhammet Ilhanli

I'm Muhammet Ilhanli. By day I'm a student splitting time between finance and electrical engineering. By habit I'm someone who would rather build the thing than write a memo about the thing.

I serve as CFO of my investment club, which is where my interest in investing started. Outside of that I work with hardware, and I'm going through The Knowledge Society's program to get better at judging new technology and the people building it.

Ilhanli Ventures is how I turn that habit into a practice. Conviction comes from doing the reps, not from reading about them.

Building something?

Pitch me

No deck needed. Tell me what you're building and why it matters. A few honest sentences beat a polished story, and I read every message myself.

Email me
  1. Your name and your startup's name
  2. What you're building, in one sentence
  3. A link to your site, deck or repo, if you have one

You can also message me on LinkedIn: Muhammet Ilhanli.

"I'd rather be the person who took the ugly first swing than the person who waited for a perfect pitch."
Working thesis