01 A corporate startup with a two-person team and a running clock
An Uber for children, with no one to build it
Kidu began inside Sabancı ARF, the conglomerate's intrapreneurship program. Sevim Örs, a Sabancı employee, was selected into the program with a sharp idea: safe, accountable transport for children, an Uber for kids aimed at busy white-collar parents who need their children moved safely while they work. The founding team was two people. Neither was an engineer, and the program's clock demanded a working product fast.
The project reached us through a chain of trust. A consultant advising companies on intrapreneurship, an old school friend of Kemal's, told them plainly that this was a job for Kemal and Furkan, and with the support and approval of the ARF program's leadership, we took on everything technical: parent app, driver app, and the web admin behind both.
02 Every feature answers one question: is my child safe right now
Trust, engineered
The flow starts with a parent posting a ride request. Vetted drivers bid, the parent accepts, and the trip begins with live route calculation and real-time location on the parent's screen.
The child's side of the app is its own design problem, solved with emoji and photo-based screens for kids who cannot yet read, kept fully separate from the parent's view. Every trip ends with a happiness score, so the quality of a ride is measured by the person the service actually exists for. The drivers were not strangers off the street: professionals who already did this work through tourism agencies and ride platforms, invited one by one and onboarded personally by the Kidu team. For them, Kidu meant a safer and better-paying line of work than the platforms they came from.
Underneath the two apps sat the web admin, where the Kidu team managed requests, drivers, and every live trip, because a two-person founding team needs the operations side handled as much as the customer side.
- Parent app with ride requests, driver bids, and live tracking
- Child screens built with emoji and photos for pre-readers
- Happiness score closing every trip
- Drivers invited and onboarded personally, one by one
03 Route deviation alerts, tested by real traffic
The times the alarm actually fired
The system's sharpest safety feature was the route deviation alert: if a vehicle strayed from its calculated route, the operations team was notified instantly and called the driver on the spot.
That alert fired several times in real life. Each time, the team was on the phone within moments, and each time the explanation was ordinary: an accident up ahead, heavy traffic, a detour any parent would have taken themselves. Not one case involved bad intent. That is exactly the point. Parents could relax not because nothing ever deviated, but because something was watching every ride, all the time, and reacting in minutes. Trust was not a promise on a landing page. It was a system behavior that had been observed working.
04 When Güler Sabancı hears your pitch, you listen back
Feedback from the very top
Because Kidu grew inside Sabancı's program, the product was pitched to an unusual audience: senior general managers across the group, and Güler Sabancı herself, listened and gave feedback.
One piece of that feedback became a feature. A deputy general manager suggested shared rides, and we built it: multiple families sharing a single minibus on a common route, cutting the price per family while keeping every safety mechanism intact. Cheaper and safe is a rare combination in child transport, and it came from treating a boardroom pitch session as user research. The pilot audience responded in kind, with the strongest traction landing precisely in the busy white-collar parent segment Kidu was designed for.
05 An investable platform in one season
The outcome
In three to four months, a two-person team with no engineers had a full platform running pilots in Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir, with hundreds of rides completed in Istanbul alone. Sabancı invested $150k on the strength of it, with the company's most senior leadership having heard the pitch and shaped the product along the way.
Kidu's ending is honest startup history: after a strong run, the venture could not outlast the pandemic and the funding contraction that followed, and wound down operations for financial reasons a few years ago. What the project proved still stands. When the product side is fully handled, two founders and a single season are enough to take an idea from a program pitch to an investment committee's yes. Three applications, zero engineers on the client side, one season on the clock: that ratio is the case study.