Remote & Global Demo Night June 2026: Aykut Becomes Canopy Community’s First Turkish People’s Choice Winner

History was made at the Canopy Community Remote & Global Demo Night in June 2026. Hosted virtually from Lisbon, the night closed with a result that has never happened in our ecosystem before: Aykut of BeautyTech AI Salon Manager became the first official Turkish People’s Choice winner in Canopy Community history.

A truly global room

The Remote & Global edition is the demo night designed for founders who cannot make it to a physical room — and for the investors and operators who want to find them. The time zone is deliberately the one that hurts everyone equally, so a founder in Asia, an investor in the Americas, and a peer in Europe can all show up in the same call.

This month’s panel reflected that mission. Dippu Kumar Singh, Leader of Emerging Data & Analytics at Fujitsu North America, joined from Texas with a research-meets-professional-services lens. Aditya Thakur, Senior Director of Software Engineering at Salesforce, joined while travelling in Asia, bringing his experience scaling ideas from prototype to enterprise. Two founders. Two panellists. Three continents. One call.

The two demos

Michael Brodie opened with OurNet.News, a community-owned local platform he has been quietly obsessing over for fifteen years. The product gives any locality its own page with chat, events, articles, groups and a marketplace, mapped against open street map boundaries. At its heart is a reputation system that mirrors how we calibrate our social behaviour offline: contribute well, your work rises; contribute badly, your work quietly sinks. Michael built the entire MVP in eight months alongside Claude, having never written code before. Monetisation is local advertising and paid private groups, with writers sharing in the advertising income their articles generate.

Aykut followed with BeautyTech AI Salon Manager, built because his wife Dilek — a London beautician with twenty years in the industry — could never put her hands down to answer her phone. Every salon has the same problem: missed WhatsApps, missed DMs, missed calls, missed regulars, and 35% commission flowing out to booking platforms that only do bookings. BeautyTech AI is a full AI manager, not a chatbot — answering messages 24/7 in any language, booking appointments, following up with customers who have drifted, and delivering business intelligence on staff and revenue on one screen. Built by Aykut with co-founder Özgür ("Oz"), BeautyTech AI already has six pilot salons on the waitlist — pure word of mouth, zero advertising.

Honest panel feedback

What made this night land was the depth of the panel questions.

Dippu pressed both founders on the things that quietly kill products built fast: misinformation guardrails and reputation rubrics for OurNet.News; data security and competitive differentiation for BeautyTech AI. Aditya widened the lens — scalability, personalisation, monetisation, and the industry shift from pure subscription to usage-based pricing. Both founders defended their thinking calmly and learned in public. When Michael was asked to assess Claude's claims about the scalability of his stack, his answer — “one of the scariest phrases of our generation: I’m just going to have to believe Claude” — got a knowing laugh from everyone on the call.

For founders watching, this is the gift of demo night: the questions you would rather be asked now than discover the answers to under fire.

The vote — and a Canopy first

When voting time came, the panel was split. Dippu went for Michael / OurNet.News, drawn to the local information use case from his own life as a traveller. Aditya went for Aykut / BeautyTech AI, calling it more groomed, with a quicker route to market and obvious applicability to dentists, GPs and other appointment-driven small businesses.

A split decision normally lands with the host — but in the spirit of community, Michael himself cast a vote in the other direction, choosing Aykut because, as he put it, he has many friends in small businesses who would love this service.

That made it official. Aykut — congratulations. You are the first Turkish People’s Choice winner in the history of Canopy Community Demo Nights.

It is a milestone we have been waiting for. Demo Night has run since 2014, across cities and time zones, and a Turkish founder taking the People’s Choice crown for the first time signals something bigger than one win. As Stewart said on the night, “I expect to see a hundred Turkish founders following in your footsteps.”

Why first-time founders and early-stage investors should keep an eye on Remote & Global

For first-time founders, the Remote & Global edition is the lowest-friction way to test a pitch in front of senior operators and peers — no flights, no venue, no excuses. You will get challenged, you will be heard, and you will walk away with feedback you cannot buy.

For early-stage investors, it is curated, founder-dense deal flow that crosses borders by design. Where else can you spend an evening watching a UK-based Turkish founder build a global salon platform alongside a British founder rewiring local community — with senior voices from Fujitsu and Salesforce on the panel?

Bring your idea to the next one

If you are building something and would like to pitch it to a global room of peers and investors, we would love to hear from you. If you are an investor or operator who would like to panel or simply attend, you are very welcome.

Sign up for the next Remote & Global Demo Night and the rest of our calendar at lu.ma/canopy. Build. Pitch. Connect. Grow.