EP. 94 - The Startup That Turned Waste Into Resource w/ Umutcan Duman

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Umutcan Duman, CEO of Evreka, joins us to share how a group of engineers turned waste collection into a global smart tech platform. From IoT sensors to AI-powered insights, they’ve been solving real problems long before the buzzwords. This is the story of building Evreka — one bin at a time.

You can find Umutcan here: https://nl.linkedin.com/in/umutcanduman

Interested in joining the podcast? DM Behrad on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/behradmirafshar/
This podcast is made by Bonanza Studios, Germany’s Premier Digital Design Studio:
https://www.bonanza-studios.com/

Chapters

1. Intro (00:00:00)

2. How Evreka Began: From University to Waste Trucks (00:00:52)

3. Spotting the Problem in Waste Collection (00:02:05)

4. Why Waste Management Is More Complex Than It Looks (00:03:36)

5. The Early Engineering Approach (00:04:44)

6. Evolving from Garbage to Resources (00:06:18)

7. The Realities of Route Optimization (00:08:10)

8. Becoming an IoT Company Without Realizing It (00:10:42)

9. Building Tech to Solve Real Problems, Not Buzzwords (00:13:37)

10. Anomaly Detection & Predictive Algorithms (00:15:00)

11. Introducing AI the Right Way (00:17:45)

12. Scaling SaaS for Global Waste Operations (00:20:10)

13. LLMs Empower Users and Reduce Support Load (00:22:20)

14. Future Roadmap: From Diagnosis to Action (00:24:55)

15. Giving Waste Generators Insight Into Their Own Data (00:27:40)

16. Connecting Waste Reduction to Business Value (00:30:50)

17. Demo Preview: What Evreka Looks Like in Action (00:33:00)

18. AI-Powered Dashboards and Smart Assistants (00:36:15)

19. Route Performance & Smart Task Reassignment (00:38:30)

20. Learning From Dispatchers, Automating Next Steps (00:41:40)

21. The Road Ahead: Autonomy, ETA, and Route Intelligence (00:43:20)

22. Closing Thoughts & The Bigger Vision (00:45:00)