My story

Growing up around a business

I was always trying to understand how things worked. I took apart electronics, tried to fix them and often left them in a worse state than I found them. I also liked watching things: buildings, people, small details that others walked past. Photography is still part of that curiosity.

Much of my practical education came from helping in our family’s manufacturing and trading business. During summers, I cleaned, loaded products, helped with bookkeeping and spoke to customers.

I saw how a late delivery or an unexpected cost could change the rest of the day. I also saw how much depended on people trusting one another. At the time, it was simply the work in front of me. I didn’t expect to come back to similar problems as an engineer.

Learning to build

I studied computer engineering at Özyeğin University in Istanbul. Later, I moved to Munich, completed my M.Sc. in Informatics at the Technical University of Munich and gained professional experience at Intel.

I enjoyed the technical work. But I also wanted to find out what it took to build something of my own. TUM’s entrepreneurial community gave me a place to start.

Starting a company

My earlier recruiting venture was selected for EXIST support. It was an important opportunity to work on an idea full time and learn how much there was to figure out beyond the software.

I later worked on logistics, developing dispatching logic and spending time with people who planned transport operations. We could build an algorithm. Getting it into someone’s daily work was another problem. Data access, integration and the buying process all mattered.

That experience changed how I approach product development. I now spend more time understanding who owns a decision, what information they have and what would make them change their current process.

Conversations with procurement teams kept bringing me back to supplier risk. A company can have plenty of documents and still struggle to explain why a supplier was approved, which findings are reliable or what needs another check.

What I’m building now

Today, I’m the founder and managing director of ONYVEN. Together with founding engineer Oğuzhan Yetimoğlu, I’m building AI for supplier risk analysis.

We’re starting with the work around a supplier decision: checking the company and its documents, understanding the evidence, and keeping track of what changes after approval.

There’s still a lot to prove. The goal is to build something a procurement team finds useful enough to come back to, and reliable enough to use in a real decision.

My background in manufacturing helps me recognise the setting. Engineering helps me work through the detail. The earlier attempts have taught me to listen more carefully before deciding what to build.

Onur Yılmaz