300 fresh starts on the road to success — Insider CEO Hande Cilingir shares her story
Fresh off a $500M fundraising, Insider CEO Hande Cilingir took the stage at the Endeavor Gala with Allen Taylor and Martin Escobari to share how they turned 290 fresh starts into a global success story.
Deep in the heart of Istanbul, there is a dog with an unusual name: EBIT.
His name is the financial acronym for “Earnings Before Interest and Tax.” But beyond a great conversation-starter, EBIT is also a testament to his human’s belief in the power of words. EBIT belongs to Insider CEO and Co-Founder Hande Cilingir, who named him in the early Insider days as another way to manifest and commit to her company’s success.
“[At that time] whenever he ran around, whenever he barked, it made us remember that we should be a profitable company,” she told the audience at Endeavor’s annual gala in December 2024. Hande asked for a moment to take suggestions for her next dog’s name. Someone shouted, “IPO?”
Hande Cilingir and Linda Rottenberg at the 2024 Endeavor Gala
Founded in 2012, Insider is the leading AI-powered omnichannel customer engagement platform built for enterprise brands. Its platform helps brands connect data, orchestrate personalized journeys, and engage customers seamlessly across 12+ natively supported channels—including WhatsApp, SMS, Email, Web, App, and Site Search. Today, the B2B SaaS unicorn company operates across 28 countries and six continents, serving 1,500+ companies including Nike, Samsung, L’Oreal, Unilever, Allianz, Walt Disney, ING Group, Toyota, Singapore Airlines, and GAP.
With a decade of AI leadership and Predictive, Generative, and Conversational AI at its platform core, Insider is in a prime position to lead the Agentic AI shift, supporting its mission to make marketing and customer engagement teams unstoppable. Recently, Insider’s Co-Founder & CPO, Muharrem Derinkok, took the stage at Insider’s annual customer summit to unveil Agent One™, Insider’s newest AI platform. Agent One™ includes Shopping Agent, Support Agent, and Insight Agent—designed to enhance brand-customer dialogue and build trust through two-way, human-like interactions across the customer journey.
As a global leader in the marketing technology space, Insider now serves one-third of the Fortune Global 500 companies. The company has been recognized as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Personalization Engines and Forrester’s Wave for Cross-Channel Campaign Management. And Hande herself has achieved global recognition, named one of the top three women CEOs outside of the US by Crunchbase and awarded Microsoft’s Woman Entrepreneur of the Year in 2016.
It’s been a massive and exciting journey. At Endeavor, over the last ten years, we’ve had the pleasure of traveling alongside.
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Almost 300 fresh starts
Looking at Insider’s journey, it’s easy to project overnight success. But Hande points out that a company is always growing, and each new step sometimes feels like a new beginning.
“People think we started Insider once, but we started it 29 times,” she says.
“When we first expanded to Malaysia, we started Insider again. When we expanded to Korea, to Mexico, to the US — each time, we started Insider again. And over 10 years expanding to 29 different countries, I multiply those two numbers. We started Insider 290 times. And whenever we started Insider again, there was Endeavor.”
We first joined forces with Insider in 2014, selecting them as an Endeavor company. Since then, Insider has been recognized on multiple occasions in our Outliers program, which highlights the fastest-growing companies in the Endeavor network. Endeavor Catalyst, our rules-based co-investment fund, invested in Insider’s Series C and Series D rounds.
But as ever, Endeavor’s investment in Insider goes way beyond the financial. As Insider expanded, we reached out to our massive network to guide the company through its rapid growth and global expansion, helping them to establish offices in new markets. Robby Kwok, Chief of Staff to the CEO at Slack, and Girish Mathrubootham, Executive Chairman and Founder of Freshworks, were particularly key in offering insight to Hande and her team.
“From opening an office in Japan or the UK to signing our first deals with the world’s top enterprise brands, Endeavor always provided invaluable support globally,” says Hande.
“Endeavor has been with Insider at every step,” agrees Allen Taylor, Managing Partner at Endeavor Catalyst. “From their earliest rounds—where Endeavor entrepreneurs were among their first investors—to supporting their subsequent institutional rounds, we’ve been helping them scale and connect with the right investors at the right time.”
Hande herself has become a local role model in Türkiye inspiring and training new generations of female founders in the country. And 34 of Insider’s former employees have had spinouts, showing off the Endeavor Multiplier Effect™ – the company’s ability to impact and empower not just their own success but on their entire region.
"We started Insider to show the whole world that breakthrough product companies can come from anywhere,” says Hande.
“From Brazil, from Mexico, from Istanbul. Entrepreneurship and Endeavor’s Multiplier Effect™ [work to the same aim], it’s all about wealth-creation and wisdom-creation.”
A Series E announcement to kickstart 2025
In November 2024, the team announced a $500M Series E led by General Atlantic. In an intimate fireside chat at the Endeavor Gala in New York in December, Martin Escobari, Co-President at General Atlantic as well as an Endeavor Global Board Member, reminisces on his initial encounter with Insider: “At General Atlantic we have a red button. Whenever someone meets a truly extraordinary company, we press the red button and then the whole firm jumps on it.”
Needless to say, meeting Hande led Martin and his colleagues to press the red button. A strong partnership felt natural on both sides.
“We didn’t choose GA because we got the best offer from GA — you were the fourth best offer, by the way,” Hande says, laughing. Instead she highlights her connection with the General Atlantic team. “Turkish people, we’re romantic by nature and we only work with the people we love.”
Martin agrees on the importance of partnership and shared values, something that all three organizations — Endeavor, Insider and General Atlantic — have in common.
“Listen, if your mission as a company is to be the partner of choice for the world’s best entrepreneurs, to support the organization that’s creating, minting and promoting entrepreneurs in so many countries is mission-consistent,” Martin says. That organization? Endeavor. “The piece of the Endeavor story that resonated with me is that when I grew up, I didn’t have any role models that looked like me, and that was so scary. I don’t want any kid to have that. At Endeavor, we’re creating those role models.”
These shared values do more than build success; they create global pockets of belonging.
“A home doesn’t have to be a place, it can be a person, an institution, a community,” says Hande.
“At Insider, most of the time, what we’re saying to ourselves is we’ll find a way, we’ll figure it out, because Endeavor is there. To us, home is Endeavor-type places, Endeavor-type people.”
