Danyal Ozduzenciler’s expensive education

Danyal Ozduzenciler had already worked in private equity when he became his own delivery rider. The new idea was an on-demand fashion marketplace. Testing it meant getting on a bicycle for eight hours a day, seven days a week through winter. The business failed. There are tidier routes into software, although few furnish quite such a persuasive argument for choosing your next market carefully.

His account of the experiment is unusually direct. He had left a comfortable finance job and put in the effort. What he lacked, he later wrote, was a deep understanding of the business he was trying to build. Failure supplied an education that enthusiasm had been unable to provide. The lesson he carried forward was to choose a problem for which he had earned his insight.

That brought him back to investment work. Today he is co-founder and CEO of Capsa AI, building software for private capital firms with CTO Callum Downie. In June 2026, Capsa announced an $18 million Series A. The distance between a fashion-delivery bicycle and financial AI looks considerable. The connection is his decision to take his own experience seriously.

“Build where you have earned insight.”

Danyal Özdüzenciler

A familiar problem, seen afresh

Before the bicycle came a small-town upbringing in Germany, in a family with Turkish and German roots. At sixteen, he left for an exchange year in the United States. A year in China followed during his undergraduate studies, then a move to the UK. He describes an appetite for unfamiliar situations and a competitive streak that included playing basketball at a professional level.

He studied accounting and finance at Goethe University Frankfurt from 2014 to 2017. His subsequent career included investment banking at Deutsche Bank and Citi and private equity at AEA Investors. Across that work, he participated in more than 50 due diligence processes. These were the repetitions behind the résumé: looking at businesses, examining their records, and assembling the information needed to decide whether to invest.

The repetition mattered. Capsa’s starting point was the time spent handling information before the useful thinking could begin. The company’s earliest description included screening businesses against a fund’s criteria, searching financial documents and consolidating several years of financial figures. The work was recognisable to someone who had done it. So were the questions a prospective customer would ask.

Personal frustration still needed a wider test. Danyal and Callum interviewed more than 100 private equity professionals while developing Capsa. That step belongs beside the founder’s years in finance. Experience gave them a place to begin; conversations with other investors helped establish that the problem extended beyond one person’s working habits. A memorable grievance can make a good opening. Customers determine whether it deserves a company.

His advice to first-time founders is correspondingly specific: “Build in a space you deeply understand”. He suggests drawing on more than 10,000 hours of personal or professional experience. That is a substantial commitment to familiarity. It means beginning with a market whose questions you recognise, where your experience helps you understand the answers and your existing relationships give you people to ask.

Two kinds of experience on one sofa

Danyal and Callum met through Antler’s UK residency. Their backgrounds supplied different parts of the same task. Danyal knew the buyer’s working day. Callum had built machine learning systems, with experience at ThirdEye Labs and Standard AI. A useful partnership could connect the irritating detail of an investment workflow with the technical work required to improve it.

Capsa’s legal incorporation dates to 2 December 2023; the company describes its building story as beginning in 2024. The first product arrived quickly. Within four weeks of entering Antler’s UK residency, Capsa had launched with funds managing more than $9 billion. Those assets belonged to the customers. They describe the setting in which the software was being tried, rather than money managed by Capsa.

Early customer reports gave the founders something more practical than a pleasing introduction. In 2024, early customers using Capsa reported average diligence time savings of 20%. For an investor trying to persuade colleagues to change a familiar process, a result tied to an existing task makes a useful starting argument. The promise has to survive contact with the actual documents.

The £1.7 million seed round followed in September 2024, led by Outward VC with participation from Cornerstone VC and Antler. It funded the next stretch of product development and hiring. Danyal had returned to finance with a different job: helping build something that other investors could use. His previous career had become a way of understanding customers.

The answer needs an address

Capsa’s early workflows were specific: extracting financial information, creating company profiles and generating reports that flag potential concerns. These are the pieces of work that sit between receiving a collection of documents and deciding what deserves closer attention. They gave Danyal’s idea a practical shape. A founder selling to his former profession needs to make the daily task easier to recognise, then easier to do.

The current platform connects information from a firm’s own systems and external providers. Capsa says generated insights link back to the material behind them. That design choice fits the investment setting. An answer has to be inspectable. If a figure looks surprising, the person using it needs somewhere to go next: the underlying document, the relevant passage, the evidence that makes the answer worth discussing.

The appeal is easy to understand without pretending that software settles an investment decision. Finding a figure and deciding what it means are different activities. A tool can shorten the first and leave more room for the second. Danyal’s business begins in that handoff. The documents remain part of the work; their usefulness depends on whether a team can reach and interrogate them.

When a fund forgets

By the June 2026 funding announcement, the founders were describing a larger problem: a firm’s accumulated knowledge spread across systems and people. Capsa’s ambition is to make previous memos, conversations, decisions and outcomes available to the next investment team. The scope now reaches across sourcing, diligence, portfolio monitoring and back-office work.

This widens the original question about lost time. A firm may already have encountered a business, examined a market or debated a particular risk. Its previous work is valuable only if the next person can find the relevant part. A folder can contain the answer and still be a remarkably effective hiding place. The archive needs to function in the working day.

Danyal’s public argument about AI adoption also reaches beyond the software itself. He has urged private equity firms to reconsider the processes around it: how they organise data, where they begin a task and how they evaluate the benefit of learning to use new systems. Buying a tool leaves those choices unresolved. A familiar sequence of work can remain familiar long after a new subscription arrives.

There is a connection to his first venture here, though he now occupies the other side of the conversation. Knowing the problem gives a founder a starting advantage. Helping a customer change how it works requires further explanation, observation and adjustment. Capsa’s wider ambition will be tested wherever a firm expects its past work to make the next decision better.

A founder learns to let go

The company’s own memory matters too. As Capsa grows, Danyal has to turn what he knows about customers into work that other people can own. His early hiring preferences included grit, resilience and willingness to take responsibility. He also wanted people prepared to challenge him. The last requirement is easy to applaud while the room is empty.

In January 2026, Jack Fisher joined as chief revenue officer after eleven years at PitchBook. Capsa’s sales had previously been founder-led. Fisher described building the commercial machinery around them: a sales playbook, clearer pipeline stages and regular visibility into progress. Danyal remained involved where his knowledge of private equity helped a customer conversation.

Fisher’s account of the working relationship provides a concrete example of delegation. He said Danyal let him own the function, make mistakes and build it in his own way, while correcting course when necessary. That combination gives responsibility some substance. The new hire gets room to act; the founder still knows how the business is progressing. Both have a job beyond attending the same meetings.

New York, with the old lesson intact

Capsa opened a New York office in January 2026, and Danyal relocated to the United States to lead the expansion. The June Series A was co-led by TX Ventures and Pivot Investment Partners, with Bek Ventures participating. Existing institutional investors returned, alongside angels including Indeed co-founder Paul Forster. The company planned to put the money into US expansion, hiring and further platform development.

The new location extends an already international life: Germany, an American exchange year, China, the UK and now New York. It also puts the founder closer to the customers Capsa wants to serve. The product’s remit has widened, the team has grown, and the funding gives them more room to build. Each change brings a fresh set of practical decisions.

The bicycle remains the useful beginning of this story because Danyal has been willing to explain what it taught him. His first business required effort and still failed. His next began with work he understood. Capsa’s ambition is now to help investment firms retain their own hard-earned lessons. Its founder arrived carrying one of his own.