Hirely

Corporate entrepreneurship context

Hirely began as an internal venture within Doğuş Group, one of Türkiye's largest conglomerates. The InvenDO program provided a structured path from idea validation through to independent company formation — a corporate entrepreneurship model where internal teams compete through stages of increasing commitment. The venture advanced from approximately 90 applicant teams through accelerator and proof-of-concept stages.

Progression to venture leadership

Led the venture from within the accelerator, expanding from software engineering into broader ownership across product, team and venture leadership. This included hiring decisions, budget allocation, product roadmap, pricing strategy and commercial execution — encompassing the full scope of building a product business from within a corporate structure.

Product

An asynchronous video interview platform designed to reduce time-to-hire for enterprise recruitment teams. The platform replaces the initial phone screening round with structured, AI-evaluated video responses:

• Recruiter-defined interview question sets per position
• Asynchronous candidate video responses
• Speech-to-text transcription of video interviews
• Generative AI evaluation of candidate responses
• Structured scoring and ranking across candidates
• Recruiter review and override interface

Screenshots

Team and operations

Built and managed a cross-functional core team spanning backend engineering, frontend development and business operations. Responsible for hiring, performance management and resource allocation. External frontend development support complemented the core team. Secured approximately $130K in product and operating budget for one year of operation, managing spend allocation across engineering, infrastructure and commercial activities.

Scale and commercial results

Customer discovery

Conducted customer discovery with HR teams and enterprise stakeholders across industries. Recurring hiring problems — particularly around screening bottlenecks and inconsistent evaluation quality — were translated into product positioning and workflow decisions. This process converted multiple enterprise organizations into paying customers.

Investment and spin-out

As the venture matured and demonstrated commercial traction, work began on financing an independent company spin-out. Secured a signed $100K lead investment commitment from Domino Ventures at a $1.5M valuation toward the planned financing round. This process required building a financial model, investor pitch materials and a credible growth narrative grounded in real customer data.

Selected stack

What this experience changed

Hirely was the transition from engineering to broader product and venture ownership. It demonstrated that the skills required to build a product extend well beyond code — into team building, commercial strategy, budget management, pricing, customer relationships and fundraising. This experience directly shaped the approach to founding Unilise Technology as an independent company.

• From software engineering to venture leadership within a corporate structure
• Full P&L responsibility including budget, hiring and commercial strategy
• Enterprise customer acquisition through direct sales and discovery
• Investment process from pitch to signed term sheet
• Cross-functional team management across engineering and business functions