Volkan Gurel

Volkan Gurel is the co-founder and CEO of Layer, an AI operating system for creative teams in gaming and entertainment. An MIT-trained engineer who has built distributed systems and machine learning pipelines at Hunch, eBay, Airware, and Coinbase, he holds four UAV patents from his drone-engineering years. In 2023 he co-founded Layer with Burcu Hakguder to let game studios generate performance-ready images, video, 3D, and audio without scaling headcount or outsourcing. The company is backed by a board of gaming heavyweights including King co-founder Riccardo Zacconi, and serves studios like Zynga, King, and Peak Games.