Birol Aksu
Field 00
Co-founder & CTO
Platforms, AI, and the teams that ship them.
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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.
01 / Now
SYLO
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.
02 / Figures
Measured
- 01€10.4Mraised as technical lead
- 0237engineers hired from zero
- 03150Mpeople reached by humanitarian cash transfers
- 0440%of the funnel converting self-service
03 / Path
Path
- 2013 – 2014
Envisage Creative
Co-founder & CTO, Istanbul
First company. iOS ordering, insurance and corporate platforms.
- 2014 – 2017
RedRose
Lead Front-End Architect, Field 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.
- 2017 – 2019
Zizooboats · FCG
Tech Lead & Senior Engineer, Berlin
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.
- 2019 – 2021
Atheneum
Lead Developer, Berlin
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.
- 2021 – 2026
Marta
Chief Technology Officer, Berlin
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.
- 2026 –
SYLO
Co-founder & CTO, Berlin
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.
04 / Plate
05 / Principles
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.
06 / Press
Press
- Business Insider, 2026Berlin AI startup SYLO raises €270K pre-seed
- TechCrunch, 2022Turning live-in care into a gig-economy platform
- Gründermetropole BerlinMarta closes Seed extension
07 / Contact
Enter the field
Email birol@birolaksu.comLinkedInBerlin, from Istanbul. English, Türkçe, Deutsch.
- Education
- B.Sc. Computer Science & Engineering, Sabancı University, Istanbul, 2013
- Stack
- TypeScript, React, React Native, Node.js, AWS Lambda, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Redshift, Kubernetes, LLM agents, Salesforce, Playwright