Berkay AkpolatCo-founder and CTO of Clevera

Berkay started writing code at fifteen, and studying medicine at Khazar University did not change that. He joined the university’s IT team as a part-time developer and, while still a student, came to lead it. With five junior developers, all computer-science graduates of the same university, he built its intranet and academic management systems and modernised the technology underneath them.

In his fifth year he left medicine to work in technology full time. He went on to study data science at Monash University’s Malaysia campus, and later transferred to Sunway University.

Berkay co-founded Artbees with his best friends, Roozbeh and Maziar Firoozmand. The company became known for its WordPress products, and Berkay developed the early ones, among them Jupiter X, which grew into one of the best-selling website-building tools, with more than $13 million in sales. Artbees has more than 200,000 customers, and Berkay has served as its CTO for years. He and Roozbeh have been building software together since 2009.

Berkay also helped build Growmatik, an AI marketing-automation platform started in 2017. It was a complex SaaS product, and it gave him early work in machine learning: models that predicted how customers of online stores would behave. Running those models meant handling large volumes of data and heavy traffic on infrastructure built on Kubernetes. Convesio acquired Growmatik in 2024; it continues today at convesio.com/convert.

Clevera began in 2023 with a problem at Artbees. A major release had left much of its tutorial library out of date, and refreshing it properly would have taken months. Berkay and Roozbeh set out to build the tool they could not find. Clevera turns one screen recording into a narrated video, a step-by-step article and a help-center page in 74 languages, and helps keep them current as a product changes. As CTO, Berkay leads the engineering team that builds it and works with them across every part of the product.

Building software is still what Berkay most likes to do, and he is most at home with problems that have no obvious answer. He has ADHD, and it is part of why that kind of work holds his attention.