Forbes Türkiye’s September 2025 issue features SCW.AI’s founder and CEO, Dr. Evren Ozkaya, on its cover as part of the magazine’s “Bosses of Science” series. The feature highlights 14 academic entrepreneurs who are transforming deep-tech research into global businesses.
This recognition places Ozkaya and SCW.AI among the leaders shaping the future of manufacturing and confirms our growing role in pharma and beyond.
Here are the highlights from the Forbes article and our notes.
From Consulting to Global Scale
SCW.AI’s story began in 2014 in New York, when Ozkaya founded Supply Chain Wizard to address the pharmaceutical industry’s compliance and traceability challenges. What started as a consulting business quickly evolved into a global Digital Factory Platform that today powers factories around the world from California to Japan in 6 continents.
Early milestones of SCW.AI started in 2019 when major pharma factories utilized our Digital Factory. Success there spread by word of mouth and positioned SCW.AI as a trusted partner to pharma and manufacturing leaders such as Takeda, Menarini, Hikma, Asteria Health, Kordsa, BP and many more.
“Our vision has always been to go beyond compliance,” says Ozkaya. “We want to help manufacturers build factories that run smarter, faster, and eventually autonomously.”
Competing with Giants, Growing with Agility
The global digital production market has well-established competitors all provided fragmented solutions that are not suitable for simple and cheap implementation. SCW.AI competes differently.
Instead of fragmented tools, we offer a single integrated platform. Factories receive plug-and-play sensor kits (IoT Devices), which are installed in minutes and deliver immediate factory visibility. This approach allows customers to boost production efficiency by up to 100% in a short while while keeping costs and complexity low.
Evren highlighted this agility is our advantage. Gartner estimates that fewer than 5% of factories worldwide are digitized. SCW.AI is proving that scalable, accessible solutions can close that gap.
Powered by Academic Excellence
Forbes highlighted Ozkaya’s academic background—industrial engineering at Bilkent, a Ph.D. from Georgia Tech, and teaching at INSEAD. But he is not alone.
SCW.AI’s product team is built around researchers with strong academic credentials in Industry 4.0 technologies. Many hold advanced degrees and publish in areas such as scheduling optimization, manufacturing AI, and digital twins.
The best example is our CTO, Murat Saglam Ph.D., who combines deep research expertise with hands-on leadership in building our platform. This academic strength is what allows SCW.AI to move fast in fields where precision, rigor, and innovation matter.
Fueling Growth with Strong Partnerships
Our journey accelerated with the strategic support of Sabancı Ventures. After the successful digitization of Kordsa’s US factories, Sabancı joined our $10 million Series A investment round led by BIP Ventures in 2022.
This funding allowed us to expand the SCW.AI brand as a dedicated software business, sharpen our focus on pharma, and prepare for entry into new manufacturing sectors.
Building Knowledge Base for Manufacturers, Not Just Software
We believe progress in pharma manufacturing requires both technology and education. That is why SCW.AI invests heavily in sharing knowledge:
Official R&D Center in Türkiye
We partner with academia and organizations like TÜBİTAK on advanced research in factory digital twins. The aim of this collaboration is to enrich manufacturing production capabilities and resilience through realistic AI simulations. Thanks to these exact digital replicas, manufacturers can streamline their decision-making processes, always achieve their golden batches, ensure world-class manufacturing, and significantly reduce costs while minimizing rework rates.
Supply Chain Wizard Podcast
Hosted by Evren Ozkaya, this podcast series features leaders from Merck, Microsoft, Kenvue, Hikma, Bristol Myers Squibb, and more, exploring new drug modalities, supply chain and manufacturing strategies, and career guidance for young professionals. Evren sees this podcast as a way of giving back to the pharmaceutical industry, which has improved his professional and personal skills and shaped his life.
Open Resources
We publish free eBooks, white papers, and handbooks that cover advanced manufacturing KPIs, AI-driven production scheduling, and the future of digital pharma. These materials are designed to give industry leaders practical tools they can apply immediately while also inspiring new ways of thinking about factory modernization.
Toward Self-Managing Factories
Artificial intelligence is central to our roadmap. SCW.AI is developing features that can eventually manage entire factory processes autonomously. To achieve this, we are continuously refining our AI algorithms and our AI HUB. This hub integrates with all of our Digital Factory solutions and is fed with new use cases as we progress.
“Many factories still rely on Excel,” Ozkaya explains. “That will not be enough in the future. Self-managing factories are no longer a distant concept—they are becoming reality.”
Recognition and Responsibility
Being featured on the cover of Forbes Türkiye is both an honor and a responsibility. It recognizes the achievements of our 50-person team, where academic knowledge and industrial transformation meet.
We celebrate this milestone with our eyes on the future: enabling manufacturers to run smarter, more efficient, and eventually autonomous factories that bring goods and medicines to people everywhere. One project at a time, SCW.AI is shaping the future of manufacturing.
Let’s Build Smarter Factories Together
To find out more about SCW.AI and Digital Factory Platform, Contact us or Book a demo now!
