Hakan Yurdakul
Hakan Yurdakul is a Turkish-born entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Bolt Insight, a London-based AI-native market research company. He holds a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering from Koç University in Istanbul and a master's degree in business management from the University of Warwick, bringing a dual grounding in engineering discipline and commercial strategy to his entrepreneurial career.
Before founding Bolt Insight, Yurdakul spent more than fifteen years at Unilever, where he built deep expertise in marketing strategy, brand positioning, and product development across FMCG categories. Working closely with consumer insight teams throughout his corporate career, he repeatedly encountered the same frustration: research was too slow, too expensive, and too rigid to support the pace of modern brand decision-making. That personal experience of the gap between insight teams and the consumers they needed to understand became the founding impetus for Bolt Insight.
He launched Bolt Insight in 2018 with a vision he describes as enabling professionals to "instantly sit next to their consumers" — creating a direct, always-on connection between brands and real people. His initial product was Bolt Chat, a human-moderated interview tool; as AI matured, Yurdakul led the development of BoltChatAI, one of the world's first AI-moderated qualitative research platforms, which conducts natural-language consumer interviews at scale and delivers actionable reports within 24 hours. The platform has now conducted over five million interviews across 90-plus markets.
Under his leadership, Bolt Insight has grown to a team of around 50 people with offices in London, Istanbul, Paris, New York, and Singapore, serving 11 of the world's top 15 CPG companies including Unilever, Danone, and Reckitt. In December 2025, the company raised £7 million in a round led by Pembroke VCT to fund its next product — an AI Chief Insights Officer that can autonomously answer business questions and commission fresh consumer research. Yurdakul is a recognised speaker on AI, market research, and the future of consumer insight.
