Mert Turna
I'm the Co-Founder of Derya (YC S26). We're bringing forth the fifth industrial revolution by hyperconnecting industrial companies with agents. It's my second YC company; before that I studied Computer Science at UCLA.
I was born and raised in Istanbul. My first love was robotics. Debating replaced it in high school, and I spent most of those years on the Turkish national team. The same cold logic carried me through both, and won me national and international championships along the way. It was how I first learned to see the blood vessels of the world. Building a company is how I get to touch them now.
I'm deeply drawn to Mark Fisher's hauntology, the idea that we live among the ghosts of futures that were promised and never arrived. Heavy industry is full of them: the machines are decades ahead of the paperwork used to buy and sell them. I'm also drawn to Deleuze's societies of control, and to what they become when agents, rather than people, do the coordinating.
On the research side, I care about long-horizon agents acting on real-world state, where the hard problem is verification rather than intelligence, and about what markets become when both sides of a negotiation are models. The product I build is a good instrument for studying both. I'm currently interested in agent memory, evaluation, and the systems required to make long-horizon agents reliable.
I'd love to talk about any of this. Reach me below.