Birol Aksu
Intro
I build engineering organisations and the platforms they run on.
Twelve years in, from a humanitarian payments system in sixteen countries and a care marketplace to AI-native products that respond to how people feel.
Now
Co-founder & CTO at SYLO
An AI-native mental wellbeing platform. Adaptive meditation that listens to stress and emotion instead of playing from a library.
- AI-native mental wellbeing. €270K pre-seed.
- 2026, Berlin
- ~76% of users report emotional relief after their first session.
Figures
- €10.4M
raised as technical lead
Three rounds. I owned the technical pitch and due diligence; KPMG's tech DD passed without remediation.
Marta, SYLO · 2021 – 2026
- 37
engineers hired from zero
Three teams including QA, built through remote hiring during COVID, with the full interview loop designed in-house.
Atheneum · 2019 – 2021
- 150M
people reached by humanitarian cash transfers
ONEsystem ran cash programmes for 11 NGOs in 16 countries. I owned its front-end architecture.
RedRose · 2014 – 2017
- 40%
of the funnel converting self-service
A statistical matching algorithm with an ML success-prediction model, matching families with live-in caregivers.
Marta · 2021 – 2026
Path
AI-native mental wellbeing. €270K pre-seed.
- Built the product from zero to live on mobile and web.
- LLM content generation paired with user-state modelling, so sessions adapt to stress and emotion.
- A multi-agent content platform that drafts, fact-checks and publishes from academic sources, unattended.
- ~76% of users report emotional relief after their first session.
Care-as-a-service marketplace for live-in caregivers.
- Co-led €10.1M across Seed and Seed extension. KPMG tech due diligence passed without remediation.
- 4 mobile and 3 web apps on one React/TypeScript codebase, all wired to Salesforce as the system of record.
- A statistical matching algorithm with an ML success model lifted self-service conversion to 40%.
- Data platform on Redshift and Metabase; GDPR lifecycle with automated PII anonymisation.
Global expert network across EMEA, APAC and the US.
- Built an engineering organisation of 37 people across three teams during remote COVID hiring.
- Owned the McKinsey Digital integration platform end to end.
- Two internal tools doubled operations throughput.
Product engineering for a boat-rental marketplace and large web apps.
- jQuery to React migration, monolith split into serverless services.
- Dynamic rendering to win back organic search.
ONEsystem, humanitarian cash transfer for 11 NGOs.
- Owned the front-end architecture of a platform reaching ~150M beneficiaries.
- Trained field staff and presented in country programmes.
First company. iOS ordering, insurance and corporate platforms.
From Bosphorus to Spree
I'm from Istanbul, where I co-founded my first company in 2013. Three years on a humanitarian cash-transfer platform, run by eleven NGOs across sixteen countries, taught me to build for the hardest conditions first. Berlin has been home since 2017: tech lead at Zizooboats, a 37-person engineering organisation at Atheneum, CTO at Marta, and now co-founder and CTO of SYLO.
Principles
- 01
Architecture follows the unit economics
Serverless where it is cheaper per user, Kubernetes where it is not. Workload by workload, never by dogma.
- 02
One codebase, many surfaces
Seven apps from one React/TypeScript codebase cut time to market by roughly half.
- 03
Teams are the product behind the product
Hiring loops, structured interviews and a culture that ships. Built from zero, three times.
- 04
AI in production, not in a demo
Matching models, adaptive content and agent systems that run unattended and are measured.
Press
- Business InsiderBerlin AI startup SYLO raises €270K pre-seed2026
- TechCrunchTurning live-in care into a gig-economy platform2022
- Gründermetropole BerlinMarta closes Seed extension
Contact
- B.Sc. Computer Science & Engineering, Sabancı University, Istanbul, 2013
- Mathematical Formulation in the Production-Line Prediction of Material Usage, YAEM 2010