Birol Aksu

BirolAksu

Co-founder & CTO

Birol Aksu, cut and torn paper portrait.

Drag any part. It snaps to the grid. Double-click to recompose.Ten flat parts on a twelve-column grid.

Composition I / IV

Berlinfrom Istanbul

Platforms, AI, and the teams that ship them.

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.

Figures

  • €10.4Mraised as technical lead
  • 37engineers hired from zero
  • 150Mpeople reached by humanitarian cash transfers
  • 40%of the funnel converting self-service

Path

  1. 2026 –

    SYLO

    Co-founder & CTOBerlin

    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.
  2. 2021 – 2026

    Marta

    Chief Technology OfficerBerlin

    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.
  3. 2019 – 2021

    Atheneum

    Lead DeveloperBerlin

    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.
  4. 2017 – 2019

    Zizooboats · FCG

    Tech Lead & Senior EngineerBerlin

    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.
  5. 2014 – 2017

    RedRose

    Lead Front-End ArchitectField programmes, 16 countries

    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.
  6. 2013 – 2014

    Envisage Creative

    Co-founder & CTOIstanbul

    First company. iOS ordering, insurance and corporate platforms.

Principles

Gouache poster: a vermilion disc, a cobalt half-moon, an ochre quarter circle and two crossed black bars
Gouache posterDisc, half-moon, quarter, two bars
  1. 05.1

    Architecture follows the unit economics

    Serverless where it is cheaper per user, Kubernetes where it is not. Workload by workload, never by dogma.

  2. 05.2

    One codebase, many surfaces

    Seven apps from one React/TypeScript codebase cut time to market by roughly half.

  3. 05.3

    Teams are the product behind the product

    Hiring loops, structured interviews and a culture that ships. Built from zero, three times.

  4. 05.4

    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

birol@birolaksu.com
LinkedIn

English / Türkçe / Deutsch

Education
B.Sc. Computer Science & Engineering, Sabancı University, Istanbul, 2013
Publication
Mathematical Formulation in the Production-Line Prediction of Material Usage, YAEM 2010
Stack
TypeScript, React, React Native, Node.js, AWS Lambda, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Redshift, Kubernetes, LLM agents, Salesforce, Playwright