Birol Yildiz

Birol Yildiz is co-founder and CEO of ilert, the Cologne-based incident-management platform that grew out of his master's work on context-aware notification and later out of on-call pain he shared with Christian Fröhlingsdorf and Roman Frey at REWE digital. The company markets itself as an AI-first alerting and response suite with a strong EU residency story.

From a thesis on alerting to REWE digital

ilert's about page traces the idea to Yildiz's thesis project around smarter notification routing. He later worked as a chief product owner at REWE digital, where he and his co-founders saw on-call still depend on spreadsheets, PBX gear, and awkward SMS gateways.

Bootstrapping ilert in Cologne

In interviews he has described leaving that well-paid role after a car accident forced a rethink, then going all-in on ilert with Fröhlingsdorf and Frey. The company stayed bootstrapped and profitable while expanding customers across Europe and North America, with Yildiz as managing director and public CEO voice.