How did HatsonTech come about?
How did HatsonTech come about? The origin story of a Turkish AI startup founded in 2024 at ODTÜ Teknokent in Ankara: what problem it set out to solve, and why it builds its own products.
HatsonTech began with a simple question: Why can’t a Turkish speaker easily access an AI that is truly powerful and trustworthy in their own language?
“The best models were built for English. So we decided to build one for Turkish.”
It started with a problem
We were following the rise of AI closely. But whenever they encountered Turkish text—especially a legal text—even the most powerful models stumbled: wrong terminology, fabricated sources, answers that missed the context. That’s because these models were designed primarily around English. Turkish’s agglutinative structure, its distinctive syntax and domain terminology (law, public administration…) were often overlooked.
This was no minor shortcoming; it was a silent disadvantage for millions of Turkish speakers. That is exactly where HatsonTech’s starting point lay.
From research to product
We set out with a lab’s curiosity. We researched how we could teach large language models (LLMs) Turkish, and gained hands-on experience training and deploying models on large-scale infrastructure through TÜBİTAK events, the national computing infrastructure TRUBA and programs such as EUMaster4HPC. As the prototypes grew, one thing became clear: the real value wasn’t a paper or a demo, but a product people open every day.
2024: Two founders, one company
In 2024, we founded Hatson Teknoloji A.Ş. at ODTÜ Teknokent in Ankara — with two co-founders: İsmail Tarık Şenkal and Halide Yılmaz. We distilled the company’s compass into a single sentence: “From data to intelligence, from research to product.”
Why a product, not a service?
Many technology companies do work for others. We chose a different path: building our own products. Because truly solving the Turkish AI problem doesn’t happen by delivering a project and walking away; it happens by owning and developing a product for years.
The first focus: law
The first focus area of this idea was law: solutions that bring together case-law search, document analysis and a smart legal assistant for lawyers and legal departments. Behind them sits our own legal language model, which we trained for the Turkish legal language, and a RAG architecture that grounds answers in real documents.
In short, HatsonTech was born not out of an urge to “let’s start a company,” but out of a real problem that needed solving. For the more technical side, you can take a look at our articles on what a large language model is and why Turkish AI.
