Career

2017-19 · Founding President · Sabancı UniversityContemporary circus arts club · Sirkus

• Founded the university's first contemporary circus arts club in 2017, after a year and a half of the administration saying no, and grew it to about 150 members.
• Learned the entry level of every prop so I could teach anyone on campus, students and staff, and start each person on whatever caught their interest.
• Ran shows and open workshops, and juggling workshops for children in care and children with leukaemia.
• Brought together, in joint events, clubs the school had failed to unite for years.
• Sabancı University Extracurricular Activities Award for contribution to campus culture, 2017, 2018 and 2019.
• Motto: “Sun on the green, Sirkus on the scene.”

The story: How Founding a Circus Arts Club Laid the Foundations of My Entrepreneurial Journey

2018 · TutorChildren's robot designs · Küçükköy Creative Technologies Workshop

• As one of the first tutors, set up the workshop's tech, wrote its syllabus and taught the block-based coding lessons.
• Children aged 8-12 drew robot designs; I 3D-modelled and printed them as bodies for the line-following robots the children built, coded and played with. It took three print rounds to get the fit right.
• Partly volunteer work.

2018-20 · Project Assistant & InstructorSabancı University Makerspace

• Supported 50+ student and faculty projects from plan to physical prototype: 3D design and fabrication, circuit and PCB design, Arduino and sensors, sound recording.
• Ran workshops across these areas, trained incoming students and staff, and built the space's music studio.
• Sat on the committee of the space's pitch competitions.

The story: Finding My Spark By Embracing Little Opportunities

2020-22 · Co-Founder & CTO · Board Member, 2022 to nowStudio hardware for video lessons · Lightboard TR

• Hardware start-up making one-button lightboard studios (lighting, automated lifting mechanics, live video mixing) for recorded teaching and events.
• Owned all R&D and technical work and did it by hand: product and mechanical design, lighting, code, soldering, technical drawings, 3D printing, material sourcing and material tests.
• Took the product from first prototype in Fusion 360 and SolidWorks to mass production on CNC, directing industrial-zone craftsmen and a production team assigned by the manufacturing partner.
• Also ran sales, installation and maintenance: sold and personally installed 20+ full studio setups.
• Bootstrapped to ~$100K revenue in the first year as COVID moved teaching onto camera; buyers included İş Bankası, Türk Telekom and Tofaş, and customers still use units built in 2020-21.

Website: lightboardtr.com ↗

The story: How a Missed Ferry Led to a Successful Startup

2021-23 · Studies paused to run a start-upMA, Sonic Arts · İTÜ MİAM

• Audio-visual installations in Max/MSP, SuperCollider and TouchDesigner.
• Wearable sensor room, with a fellow student: light, proximity and microphone sensors plus ESP32 pendants worn by five people, their movement driving generated sound and visuals. I wrote the synths and sensor triggers in SuperCollider and Max/MSP.
• Live-coding concert and electroacoustic pieces.
• Tonmeister for a jazz group on a summer tour.

2022 to now · Co-Founder & CEO · İstanbul / LondonAI for game studios · CogniScope

• Started in 2022 as dert., “breaking new grounds in psychology & technology”: with psychologists and academics, built an NLP engine, our own data-labelling tool, and models reading emotion, thought and behaviour in text.
• Launched Myna, a pre-ChatGPT reflective-diary app (200-user closed beta), and paused it: the models of the time could not read a person precisely enough, and a wrong self-analysis could hurt someone.
• Led prototyping end to end with a team of up to 12: set technical direction, contributed to the code and drove iteration from customer requests.
• Moved the company into games in 2024 and used AI-assisted development to go from concept to working prototype in days: a community-insights dashboard, then on-demand AI analysis agents, an AI community manager, and root-cause investigation and KPI-triggered incident-detection prototypes, co-designed with teams at Riot Games and Miniclip.
• Brought it together as an AI sidekick for studio teams, in closed beta: it connects to community channels, support tools, telemetry and KPIs, takes the questions a sentiment score can't answer, weighs the trade-offs with the team, and turns the decision into Jira tasks, GitHub issues, Zendesk follow-ups and Slack updates.
• Ran 320 discovery calls in a year with game studios, publishers and live-service teams.
• Techstars San Francisco 2024, with the Demo Day pitch at Google's San Francisco office; Google for Startups Accelerator: AI First; earlier Startup Wise Guys, Academia Park London and Cube Incubation (Teknopark İstanbul).

Websites: cogniscope.co ↗ · dert.solutions ↗

Along the way

• 2013-20 · BASc, Mechatronics, Robotics and Automation Engineering · Sabancı University. Board member of the Dance Club (2013-17, events and organisation) and the Music Club (2016-17).
• 2017-19 · Volunteering · Civic Involvement Projects. Taught English, ethics and life skills at primary schools, for social awareness and equal opportunity.
• 2017 & 2020 · Mechanical design internships · Lazerdem Metal Industry & VİNÇSAN. Modelled customised industrial machinery in AutoCAD and SolidWorks; hands-on with laser cutting, sheet-metal bending, 5-axis CNC machining, welding and PLC programming.
• 2018 · LEGO EV3 vision robot · Autonomous Mobile Robotics course. First robotics project: a LEGO EV3 robot with an added camera that read edges in real time, judged its speed and distance from them and stopped before hitting anything. Wheeled and four-legged modes.
• 2019 · Camera-equipped precision drill for Kordsa · graduation project. A pneumatic drill boring holes at micron-level precision in composite materials, with a camera so the material's properties could be measured from the hole marks. Team of five; mechanical design and production were mine.
• · Talk · London Tech Week. Joined the delegation from Türkiye and gave a talk.