Anything can be made famous.

Merf is an AI company from Istanbul. We spent four years getting more than 500 songs in front of people. Now we build the software that came out of that work.

See the products mert@merfapp.com

Right now

  • Live

    Episode one of The Council is on YouTube. Socrates, Nietzsche and Jung debate artificial intelligence. Watch it

  • In build

    TalkWith for iOS and Android.

  • Demo on request

    Merf Social, for agencies and labels.

  • Research

    A study on when language models mistake a familiar-looking question for one they can answer.

What we’re building

TalkWith

Call Einstein. Text Socrates.

TalkWith is a mobile app for talking with AI versions of historical figures by text, voice and video call. It starts with Einstein, Jung, Rumi and Socrates.

They stay in character
Each figure runs on a seven-layer personality engine rooted in Jungian psychology.
They stay in their century
No figure knows what happened after they died. Tell them and they reason from there.
They refuse fake quotes
If they never said it, they tell you so.
They teach by analogy
Learning mode explains a new idea through something you already know, then checks that you can use it without the comparison.

In build for iOS and Android Built end to end with Claude Code, React Native and FastAPI.

The Council

TalkWith’s YouTube series. Conversations that history never had. Episode one was written, generated and edited in-house on a single graphics card.

Watch on YouTube

Albert Einstein

1879–1955

His world ends in 1955. He has never seen a photograph of a black hole.

Tell him about it and he reasons from there.

Interface sketch. Pick a name.

Merf Social

All your accounts. One upload.

Merf Social is publishing software for people who run a lot of pages. Connect the TikTok, Instagram and YouTube accounts you own, upload a video once, and schedule it everywhere from one calendar.

One calendar
Every account and every scheduled post in one view.
A status for every post
You see what has gone out on each account and what is still scheduled.
Only your own accounts
You connect accounts you own. Nothing gets posted anywhere else.

In build. Demos on request. Ask for a demo

teaser.mp4Vertical video, 23 seconds
  • TikTokyour pageReady
  • Instagramyour pageReady
  • YouTubeyour channelReady

A demo. Nothing gets posted.

In 4 years 500+ songs 10 TV series

Mert started promoting songs on TikTok at 16. At 18 he ran the main and fan accounts of ten TV series for a major production company and sat in the meetings with TikTok himself.

A few of the songs

On Maşallah, Mert is credited for PR in the end titles of the video.

Watch the video

Maşallah
Reynmen & Doğukan Sarıtaş
CISTAK
Era7capone ft. Batuflex
Doyamadım
Çakal & AKDO
Yo
Tarkan
nE !?
Lvbel C5

What a release gets

A plan

Which part of the song, which formats, which creators and pages, and in what order.

Dozens of edits

A network of more than 30 editors and our own render tools turn one song into lyric videos, clips and cuts.

Daily distribution

Lyric pages, fan pages and a creator network keep the song in the feed every day of the release.

Tools we built for it

  • Template renderer

    Turns one After Effects template into many versions of the same video.

  • Lyric video engine

    Transcribes the song, finds the chorus, syncs the words to the beat and renders on the GPU.

  • Edit engine

    Learns the cut timing of a reference edit and applies it to new footage. Covered by 89 tests.

  • Creator network

    Matches small TikTok creators with new sounds and runs briefs and payments over Telegram.

    In build
  • Concert ads

    Builds the Meta ad campaign for a show straight from its Instagram post. Made for Coteamunity, the concert company Mert co-owns.

Lab

Research and side projects. Some of them turn into products.

  • Jarvis

    A personal assistant model. Retrieval over Mert’s own archive plus QLoRA fine-tunes of open-weight models, trained and run on a single RTX 5090.

    In build
  • False familiarity

    Do language models make things up more often when an unanswerable question looks like a fact they memorized? The first run covered 200 questions on a local open-weight model.

    Research
  • DéjàVu Engine

    Matches today’s market sentiment against 97,000 historical records. Every idea is pre-registered and tested out of sample first. It is research, not a trading product.

    Research

Mert İpek

Founder and CEO

Mert started working at 16, promoting songs on TikTok for Turkish artists. Running hundreds of campaigns by hand pushed him to automate them, and the automation became software.

Today he builds Merf’s products himself, with Claude Code and a network of editors, from Istanbul.

  1. 16First song campaigns on TikTok.
  2. 18Runs the social accounts of ten TV series.
  3. NowBuilding TalkWith and Merf Social. Still running campaigns.
Based in
Istanbul
Programs
NVIDIA Inception. BTM, the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce incubator.
Builds with
Python, FastAPI, React Native, Next.js, PostgreSQL, Claude Code

Tell Mert what should be famous next.

mert@merfapp.com

Artists and labels
A campaign for your next release.
Agencies
A Merf Social demo.
Schools and universities
An early TalkWith pilot.