making ai real-world ready

Meet Turkish e-⁠resident Arman Kayhan, co-founder of Co-One, an AI product-focused business looking to expand into the EU Single Market

Artificial intelligence. AI. There was the hype and then there was the doubt. Now, it seems that people are taking a more leveled and pragmatic approach to machine-simulated intelligence. Through it all, Estonian e-⁠resident and Turkish national and Forbes 30 under 30 honoree Arman Kayhan has been working industriously through his company Co-one. He works days, nights, in good weather and bad. 

According to Kayhan, who relocated from Istanbul to Tallinn a few years ago to build Co-one, he even enjoys Estonia's notoriously drawn-out and dismal winters. They let him get more done.

"It's true that the winters are not so bright, but that's good," says Arman. "I can stay in and have more meetings online."

He finished up his bachelor's at Istanbul Technical University in 2019, and obtained his master's degree two years later. By that time, an earlier interest in aeronautical engineering had evolved into a passion for AI. During his studies, he also held various roles in Smart Connected Laboratories, an R&D-based entity within the Eczacibasi Group focused on developing new smart connected home technologies. During his time there, he obtained five patents on smart learning systems. 

He started out as an R&D engineer, then later became its software architect, and later its AI product owner. "Those were the days when I realized that you had to start from data if you are building an AI application," he says.

A lot of the knowhow he developed at Smart Connected Laboratories is being applied at Co-one, a company he founded in 2020 with Mert Menekşe, a fellow graduate from Istanbul Technical University with experience in managing startups and working for venture capital firms. At the same time that they launched Co-one , they also introduced Kovan as a crowdsource data application. The purpose of Co-one, notes Armas, was to serve as a business-to-business firm, one that could get investments and help expand its AI offerings and expertise to Europe.  

The name for both, by the way, comes from kovan, the Turkish word for beehive, as bees happened to be the mascot of Istanbul Technical University.

But why Estonia and why was e-⁠Residency the right step for a team that was wholly Turkish?

Arman explains:

Europe, he says, is ripe for a company that can help partners improve their AI products and services, and setting up Co-one as a European company headquartered in Estonia with the help of the e-⁠Residency program made the most sense. 

"Estonia was really the only country with an e-Residency opportunity," says Arman. He and Mert applied and were granted e-Residency, picking up their cards from the Estonian consulate in Ankara. As is the case with, basically, all e-residents, getting the cards and setting up the company was a piece of cake, especially for two Turkish kids who were knee-deep in AI. They also intended to relocate to Tallinn too, but the COVID-19 pandemic was at its height, and the business world was thoroughly virtual in those years. When it became possible, both came to Tallinn. According to Arman, Co-one was aware of Estonian state efforts to invest in AI, and also saw cooperating with the Estonian government and the surrounding startup ecosystem as an opportunity for the company. 

There are now plans afoot to expand the Co-one team to include local AI engineers, with about five hires planned. But despite its smaller size, compared to say, Germany, there is a large Turkish community connected to Estonia. According to the Turkish Embassy, more than a thousand Turks now live in the country, and there are more than 3,000 Turkish e-⁠residents now.

"We did a lot of research before we came here," acknowledges Arman. "We spoke to a lot of people who were involved in defense and cyber security."

Other than those long, business-meeting friendly winters, there are certain perks to doing business in Tallinn, Arman says. One is just the size of the city, which is not only smaller than larger world metropolises, with a population of just under 500,000, but is easier to traverse. 

"You can go places without wasting your time and commuting isn't an issue," says Arman.

Tallinn also hosts the annual Latitude59 conference, which bills itself as the "flagship startup and tech event of the world's first digital society." This year's conference, held last month, saw 3,500 attendees, 900 startups, and 20 national delegations converge. While startup and tech events abound, Arman says there are reasons that Latitude59 has emerged as a favorite destination.

"Latitude is more focused, there's no noise, and you can reach out to the people you actually want to talk to," he says. "The people who come to Latitude have a plan, who they want to reach, what they need, what they need to ask," he says.

Talking about Co-one might seem, at first glance, complicated. Co-one pledges to "transform industries with AI innovation," from wellness and aerospace to manufacturing and agriculture. While all of these use cases could warrant different skill sets, Arman says that actually the core of what Co-one offers is the same.

"We make AI products real-world ready," he says. "And that only happens with high-quality data." The core of the company's platform was developed in-house, and the major AI component is something Arman calls "active learning," which the company created on its own.

"In the past two years, we have managed to make 45 different unique AI products ready for use in our daily lives," says Arman. The company also made its first sales in the Netherlands and Qatar, and has plans to soon enter the UK market. It's also close to closing a late-seed investment of €1.8 million, he added. All of these activities have garnered attention too. This year, the European edition of Forbes named Mert and Arman in its annual "30 Under 30" list.

And as for the future of AI? Well, it's a little clearer than it used to be. "I think for users it might be something like a camera application that we use for free in our phones," says Arman. "But for enterprises it has to be attached to a certain business key performance indicator," he adds. 

Businesses, though, want to know what value AI will actually generate for their companies, and if the money they are paying for it is worth it. "This part," he says, "hasn't been answered yet."