A life spent
building.

I was born in Eskişehir and grew up in Karşıyaka, İzmir. After university I moved to Istanbul with one big idea: build one of the biggest ad agencies in Türkiye.

No resources. No network. No experience.

That was the beginning. I’ve never worked for anyone else. My whole career has been building my own companies and learning on the job.

I live in London now, but Istanbul never really left me. My life is my family, my friends, the Adin.AI team, my cat Hank and my dog Reçel. We’re in it together.

My sister Seden and I have been building companies together for about fifteen years. We came at it from opposite ends, and honestly, that’s why it works.

When I got to Istanbul in 2005, I had a gap I wanted to fill, not a career. Seden had studied at the London School of Economics, come back to Türkiye and joined Leo Burnett, where she became client services director. She knew from the inside how big brands think, decide and buy. I knew how to start something from nothing. When she joined Youth Republic as vice president, we became a team.

Then we started YW (YouthWorks) together, to put data, media and creativity under one roof. Through our companies we’ve worked with more than 50 Fortune 500 brands, Coca-Cola, P&G, Unilever and Vodafone among them.

In 2022, before generative AI went mainstream, we started asking what it could do for creative work. Not just making content faster, but getting people, data and AI agents to work together. That became Brave New World in London, which Seden leads. The name comes from Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel, and we registered it as a trade mark in the UK and the EU. Huxley worried about what technology would take from people. We wanted to see how far it could carry their imagination.

Adin.AI grew out of the same years, and Seden is one of its co-founders too.

Four companies, one idea: bring together things that were kept apart, and make something possible that wasn’t before. Every time the industry shifted, we asked ourselves the same question. Why shouldn’t we be the ones to build what comes next?

The longer version of our story is on the Brave New World site ↗.

I’ve spent my whole career building companies. In twenty years the work has changed a lot, from youth marketing to creative and media and now AI, but every company taught me something I took into the next one.

Youth Republic

Youth Republic was about connecting brands with a new generation, and along the way it helped build a whole new marketing category. It taught me to spot new markets early, find young talent and build a company with them. Starting with nothing meant learning the business while I was building it.

YW

At YW we put creative and media on the same data foundation. Working with more than 50 Fortune 500 brands gave us a front-row seat to big-company marketing: the ambition, the complexity, and how hard it is to get teams, platforms and decisions that don’t talk to each other to actually work together.

So Youth Republic taught me how to build a niche category, and YW taught me how to connect marketing through data. Put the two together and you get the starting point for Adin.AI.

The idea for Adin.AI first came to me in 2020. After years of working with global brands, one question kept coming back: how could AI help marketing teams manage all of their ad spend, across every part of a big business?

In 2022 we started Adin.AI. I stepped away from the agency world to build a tech company, and brought everything I’d learned about brands, data and teams with me.

We’re building AI infrastructure for marketing.

In plain English: we give marketing teams one connected place to plan, manage and optimise their ad spend across markets, brands and channels. Adin.AI brings together ad data, business rules and the decisions people make, so the AI actually understands the business it’s working for.

Today more than 45 global brands use Adin.AI in over 20 countries to manage their ad spend with AI, including L’Oréal, Vodafone, İşbank, The Magnum Ice Cream Company, Pluxee and Under Armour. Over $100 million in ad spend has been managed through the platform.

Brand Memory is one piece of that. It holds on to what a brand learns, so the next decision can use it. The bigger goal is to make AI a normal part of everyday marketing work, with people setting the strategy and steering the tech.

In the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Türkiye 2025, Adin.AI was named Türkiye’s fastest-growing tech company. For someone who turned up in Istanbul with no resources, no network and no experience, that one felt really personal.

As we grew internationally, we also came 13th out of 500 in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 EMEA. An early sign that we could take the company beyond Türkiye and build for marketing teams in other countries too.

We’re now 28 people, 15 of them engineers, spread across London, Amsterdam, Prague, Dubai and Istanbul. My job keeps changing as the company grows: first the idea, then the team, then earning the trust of global brands, and now growing across borders.

Rankings are nice, but they’re only part of the story. The people building the platform, and the marketing teams who trust us with their budgets, are what make the next chapter possible.