After securing our first Angel Funding Round from Emre Aydın, Çiçeksepeti.com’s founding chairman, last February, we announced today the closing of our Seed Funding Round with both Hasan Aslanoba and Alp Saul joining. We are now well positioned and backed to further develop our product as we prepare to launch it nationwide.

Volt is a mobile ridesharing platform that connects drivers that have empty seats with passengers going in the same direction. To create trust, Volt uses a triple trust layer: 1) It shows you how you’re socially connected to other Volt users by showing you the mutual friends you have with them. 2) It is community based so members of the same community can share rides together. Communities could be residential compounds, university campuses, or even corporations and business plazas. 3) It has a ratings and reviews system whereby both drivers and passengers review each other at the end of each trip, which keeps the system ever improving.

Launched as a test community last April, residents of Avrupa Konutları TEM are now able to share rides with their neighbors. This is one of Volt’s key point of differences vs. other players. The community feature connects you with neighbors living around you, colleagues working at the same company/business plaza and/or other students/graduates at the same university. These are people whom you already see on daily basis, but do not interact with them. Today, Volt is only launched at Avrupa Konutları but will soon be expanding to more.

We will be using the investment to further develop our product on iOS, launch its Android version and start rolling out the service across the country. We will also be spending a lot of effort on improving the trust system that will allow people to share rides with others without worrying about safety. The future is here and we’re only catalyzing the change. In a year or two, it will no longer make sense to drive alone while you can have someone join your trip and pay for your gas. This is already happening in Europe between cities, we want to do it as well inside the city.

What the team at Volt is doing is simply putting together social networks, credit cards, GPS and Image Recognition made possible by smartphones, and mixing them all up to shape up Volt: a ridesharing platform that makes it easy and safe to share a ride.

Today Volt is a team of 8 people, however I expect the startup to grow into a team of 15 with business development, marketing and communication functions adding up to the current tech team. We are building the future of technology enabled transportation and for that we’re always hiring people who are smarter than us. You can check our careers website at thevoltapp.com/en/career and have a chance to be part of this change.