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Taylan Ozdemir Aydin, a top graduate of Robert College in Istanbul and Princeton University computer science major, has launched an artificial intelligence startup in the healthcare sector after receiving a $1 million investment.
According to a report by Turkish media outlet Hurriyet’s Beyazit Senbuk, Aydin’s path from science olympiads and international competitions to research experience at MIT and academic achievement at Princeton has now culminated in the creation of Flyway Health, an AI-driven data analysis company for the pharmaceutical industry.
Aydin’s academic journey began with scholarships at Türkiye’s top schools before he earned a full scholarship to Princeton.
Together with his roommate and co-founder, Andre Biehl, he established Flyway Health, which aims to modernize data analysis and decision-making in the pharmaceutical sector.
The company secured $1 million in investment even before Aydin’s graduation.
In his senior year, Aydin developed an AI-based data analysis system for the pharmaceutical industry. He said the idea was born from identifying gaps in healthcare data collection.
“We realized that in rural parts of the U.S., patient data is not consistently provided, which creates a major problem for the R&D and marketing divisions of pharmaceutical companies,” Aydin said.
“Since the limited data did not represent people in rural areas, treatments could not be developed or marketed for them.”
Aydin and Biehl initially received a $500,000 investment offer from a U.S. accelerator program but declined to drop out of university.
Instead, by December 2024, they pivoted to focus on healthcare data analysis, building tools to navigate the complexity of insurance data and disease coding.
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Aydin explained that their system simplifies the vast coding networks used for diseases and medications.
“Each type of cancer has a different code, and these codes even vary according to whether it has metastasized. So, there are thousands of codes for all diseases and drugs. We started working on an idea that provides easy access to these codes and uses a database to identify patients,” he said.
The company’s AI-supported application can generate detailed reports in minutes—work that would typically take healthcare data analysts much longer—based on parameters such as disease, medication, time period and region.
“This work, which received $1 million in investment, has begun to be used in the U.S.,” Aydin said.
“Our goal is to make Flyway Health a pioneering company that will fundamentally transform traditional data analysis systems and decision-making processes in the healthcare sector.”
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