It started with seeing an opportunity
When Serhat Gürcü graduated from university and arrived in Istanbul in 2005, there was no career in advertising waiting for him. He had no strong network, no capital and no industry experience.
But he had noticed something important.
Big brands wanted to reach young consumers, yet struggled to understand their world. Traditional advertising methods were not keeping up with a changing youth culture.
Serhat saw a big opportunity in that gap and founded Youth Republic.
Built to create real connections between young people and brands, Youth Republic became one of the pioneers of youth marketing in Türkiye. Led by Serhat for ten years, the company grew to around 150 people and became one of the country’s largest independent advertising agencies.
That first venture taught Serhat not only how to build a company, but how to create a new market.
Years later, the same approach would be the start of a much bigger change.
A strong partnership born from different experiences
While Serhat was carving his own path as an entrepreneur, his sister Seden Gürcü was building a successful career in global advertising.
After completing her studies at the London School of Economics, Seden returned to Türkiye and joined Leo Burnett, one of the world’s largest advertising agency networks, where she rose to client services director. She later joined Youth Republic as its vice president.
The two siblings had complementary experience.
Serhat was an entrepreneur focused on building new business models and spotting opportunities early. Seden knew the needs, corporate cultures and workings of international marketing at big brands from the inside.
In 2017 they joined forces and founded YouthWorks.
YouthWorks brought three areas that had long worked apart in advertising, data, media and creativity, under one roof.
The approach may not have been new, but the siblings put it at the centre of the company’s business model. YouthWorks quickly became one of Türkiye’s most notable independent advertising agencies.
Across their careers, the world’s biggest brands, including Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Unilever and Vodafone, played an important part.
Through the companies they founded and led, they served more than 50 companies on the Fortune 500 list.
That experience would become one of the biggest advantages of their later ventures.
Because they knew not only what big brands want, but how they make decisions, what problems they face and why they need to change.
An idea to change the future of advertising
One thought kept coming back throughout their careers: systems that work apart can become smarter and more effective when they come together.
At Youth Republic they had brought brands and young people together; at YouthWorks, data and creativity.
But the advertising world kept changing.
Digital media channels multiplied, data scattered across platforms, and marketing teams had to work with ever more complex systems.
For Serhat and Seden, that complexity was a new problem to solve.
In 2022, before generative AI had reached the wider public agenda, the two began exploring the technology’s potential for the creative industries and using AI in advertising processes.
What interested them was not just producing content faster. They imagined a new system in which human creativity, data and AI agents work together.
That idea led to a new venture in London.
Brave New World: from the title of a novel to a new creative future
The name they chose for their new venture said how ambitious the idea was: Brave New World.
The name comes from the famous novel by the English writer Aldous Huxley, published in 1932.
Huxley’s Brave New World imagined a future in which technology radically transforms human life. It became one of the best-known works of modern literature questioning the power of technology and its effect on human life.
For Serhat and Seden, the name stood for the technological change we are living through.
They secured the UK and European trade mark rights to Brave New World in advertising and marketing, turning the name into the identity of their creative technology venture.
Where Huxley’s novel questioned technology’s possible threats to humanity, their venture pursued a different possibility: could technology take human imagination further?
Born from that thought, Brave New World developed a creative working model unlike traditional advertising agencies.
The technology the company calls the Agentic Creative Intelligence System brings AI agents together across consumer research, creative strategy and idea development.
The system helps creative teams explore more ideas, weigh different perspectives and develop stronger campaigns.
Used today by leading brands, this technology positions Brave New World beyond the traditional advertising agency, as a new-generation creative technology company.
For the two siblings, AI is not a tool to replace human creativity. It is a new way of working that can push its limits further.
ADIN.AI: bringing the marketing world into one intelligence
Serhat and Seden’s vision for technology was not limited to creativity.
Working with global brands for years, they had watched another problem up close.
Big advertisers invested millions of dollars a year across different media channels. Yet planning, managing, measuring and optimising those investments happened in separate systems.
Marketing teams had more data than ever, but turning that data into meaningful decisions was getting harder.
To solve this, ADIN.AI was launched together with the other co-founders.
ADIN.AI is an AI-based platform built for marketing teams.
By bringing together data from different advertising channels, it helps brands plan, manage, analyse and optimise their media investments.
The platform’s core aim is not to give marketing teams more tools, but to let them run different systems from one intelligent centre.
Used today by more than 50 brands in more than 20 countries, ADIN.AI has become part of big advertisers’ marketing operations.
The company’s technology is built on the experience of a team that spent years solving problems for the world’s leading brands.
But what makes ADIN.AI’s story remarkable is not only its technology; it is how fast that technology has grown.
A technology success story from Türkiye
ADIN.AI’s rise caught the attention of leading institutions in technology and business.
In 2024 it ranked fourth in Fast Company Türkiye’s list of the 50 most innovative companies.
But the company’s most striking result came a year later.
ADIN.AI took first place in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Türkiye 2025 programme with a growth rate of 8,990 percent, and was named Türkiye’s fastest-growing technology company.
The achievement showed not only the rapid growth of a young technology venture, but that an AI platform developed in Türkiye was beginning to find its place in international markets.
The company also ranked 13th among 500 technology companies in Europe, the Middle East and Africa in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA 2025.
Its 4,348 percent revenue growth in the EMEA ranking was another important sign of ADIN.AI’s performance at international scale.
The company’s investors include the AI Factory of İş Bankası, one of Türkiye’s longest-established financial institutions.
All of this shows that ADIN.AI is not just a promising idea, but a company with real customers, working technology and international growth.
Given that Serhat arrived in Istanbul in 2005 with no resources, these achievements hold a special place in the story.
The young entrepreneur who founded his first company after spotting the communication gap between big brands and young people is now among the founders of a global company building AI technology to manage those same brands’ marketing investments.
The siblings’ shared vision
Serhat and Seden Gürcü’s nearly 15 years of working together have been recognised with hundreds of awards in Türkiye and internationally.
Serhat was named to Fortune Türkiye’s 40 Under 40 list five times. Seden was a Great British Entrepreneur Awards finalist and appeared six times on Fast Company’s lists honouring women entrepreneurs.
But what the siblings’ story has in common goes beyond their awards or the size of the companies they built.
In every new venture, they focused on a problem the industry had not yet fully solved.
With Youth Republic, they created a new space in youth marketing.
With YouthWorks, they brought creativity, data and media together.
With Brave New World, they brought AI agents into human creativity.
With ADIN.AI, they brought separate marketing systems together in one intelligent platform.
Four different ventures, one shared idea.
Bringing disconnected worlds together to make possible what was not possible before.
From Istanbul to London, from services to technology
Serhat and Seden’s story is not just about two successful advertising people going international.
It is the journey of two entrepreneurs who knew an industry from the inside for years, worked with the world’s biggest brands, and finally decided to build their own technology for that industry’s future.
Careers that began in Istanbul continue today with AI technologies developed in London and used in different countries.
In the past they offered the world’s biggest brands creative ideas and marketing services.
Now they are building systems that could change how those brands work in the future.
And perhaps that is the most striking part of their journey.
Serhat and Seden Gürcü did not settle for adapting to a changing world. At every major shift in their careers, they asked themselves the same question:
Why shouldn’t we build the next world ourselves?
