Cuneyd Zapsu was born in Istanbul as a descendant of Bedir Khan Beg and also . After the Turkish coup d'état of 1960 the family had to leave Turkey as his father was a politician in the governing Democrat Party. They moved to Munich, Germany, where he attended primary education. They returned to Istanbul in the second half of the 1960s, and he went to the German High School. After his high school graduation, he studied business administration at the Istanbul University and later also economy at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.