In recent years, a quiet yet highly significant transformation has been taking place in the digital world: companies are being forced to regain control of their data.
For a long time, companies collected customer data largely through third-party cookies and tools provided by major platforms. However, regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), the introduction of App Tracking Transparency policies, and new restrictions imposed by browsers have fundamentally changed this structure.
Today, many companies are not only experiencing data loss; they are also struggling to keep control of their data within their own systems.
A Major Transformation in the Data Ecosystem
This shift is forcing companies to rethink their data infrastructures. Instead of platform-dependent data flows, first-party and server-side data architectures are increasingly becoming the new standard.
The ability for companies to collect, enrich, and distribute their own data across different systems in a controlled way has become critical both for operational efficiency and regulatory compliance. At the same time, managing data coming from websites, mobile applications (iOS and Android), and various digital channels through a single infrastructure is creating a new backbone for companies in terms of data ownership and measurement capabilities.
Hardal: An Infrastructure Layer for First-Party Data
Hardal, in which we have recently invested as Simya VC, is positioned precisely at this intersection.
Hardal provides a data infrastructure layer that allows companies to collect data from their websites, mobile applications, CRM systems, and marketing tools through their own servers. The platform standardizes and validates this data, then distributes it securely and consistently across different systems — from analytics tools to advertising platforms.
This approach enables companies not only to track website traffic but also to make user interactions from iOS and Android applications visible and measurable, and increasingly, even traffic coming from AI agents. As a result, companies can analyze the real usage of their digital products in a much more holistic way.
Not Just a Tool, but a Data Backbone
One of the key strengths of Hardal’s approach is that it does not attempt to replace existing tools.
Rather than competing with systems such as Google Analytics 4, Meta, Google Ads, or data warehouses, Hardal functions as a data backbone that organizes and strengthens the data flowing into these systems.
This allows companies to maintain ownership of their data while also building far more reliable data pipelines.
The Importance of Data Infrastructure in the AI Era
Today, data infrastructure is critical not only for analytics and marketing performance but also for feeding artificial intelligence systems.
The success of AI models depends largely on the quality of the data they are trained on. For this reason, strengthening first-party data infrastructure has become a strategic necessity — not only for today’s analytics needs but also for tomorrow’s AI applications.
The infrastructure provided by Hardal also enables companies to securely and controllably manage the data flows that will feed their own first-party AI models. Especially for enterprise companies, integrating their AI models with Hardal through MCP servers to manage data flows is becoming one of the key building blocks of next-generation AI applications.
At Simya VC, we see infrastructure startups emerging at the intersection of data ownership, privacy, and artificial intelligence as one of the most critical technology areas of the coming years.
Behind Hardal is a founding team with deep experience in marketing technologies and data infrastructure.
Barış Gürbüzler has led data-driven growth projects with global brands through his experience in product, growth, and marketing leadership roles, and he is a founder who has closely experienced the data loss and attribution challenges faced by marketing teams.
Berkay Demirbaş has been working on marketing engineering and analytics infrastructures for more than a decade and has a strong technical background in building large-scale tracking architectures and data pipelines.
These two strong founders, together with their team, are building a platform that is both technically robust and commercially powerful. We believe Hardal has the potential to become one of the key infrastructure players at the center of this transformation.
🚀 Welcome to the Simya VC portfolio, Hardal!