Aylin Şahin LL.M., PhD.

Founder
aylin@igniterstech.com
Whitney leaning against a railing on a downtown street

Aylin is the founder of Igniters Tech Law Firm and the Cofounder of Heaventures VC. She is in the legal profession for the last 20 years, a tech lawyer, an adjunct professor at Istanbul Bilgi Law School teaching startup and technology law courses. She is an investor in  12 technology companies, advisory board member of 5 and a board member of 3. For more than 13 years she has been working with technology startups, regional and international technology investment funds and angel investors helping them to design their legal infrastructure, operate successfully and exit with big returns. She also works with governments and multinational enterprises on all matters regarding open innovation. Aylin is regarded as one of the most prominent tech lawyers living in the MENA region.

After an internship at a prominent law firm in Türkiye, she started her legal career in 2004 at an international M&A firm working on a 7 Billion USD privatization project in Türkiye. She advised Fortune 500 companies on their M&A projects in Türkiye, Europe, Russia and MENA. During the same period, she was an advisor to the European Union Harmonization Commission and Joint Parliamentary Committees in the Turkish Parliament. In 2010 she moved to San Francisco Bay Area for her Master's (High Honors) and JSD/Ph.D. degree (High Honors) in tech law at UC Berkeley Law, top IP law school in the USA. During the 10 years when she lived in the US, she worked with tech startups and investors, and was involved in the establishment of incubation centers and accelerator programs in Silicon Valley supported by the Turkish government and private Turkish funds and was a consultant to METU’s Growth Circuit incubation center in San Francisco for a long time. She has served as a GSR at Berkeley Law School and Berkeley's Political Science Department, appointed as a visiting professor at the Max Planck IP Institute in Munich, worked at EFF, the largest digital rights NGO in the US, and served as an editor and associate editor for several law journals including Berkeley Technology Law Journal. She has publications at several peer reviewed journals on tech law, international law, business law and political science.

Aylin is a mother of two, a former Turkish national dance champion, a proud Philip Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition champion, a lover of nature and a regular contributor of several charities established for the wellbeing of children and women in poverty.