Growing up in Istanbul, Ulupreneur Ali Sarilgan had no idea what career he wanted to pursue. In Turkey, students can be pushed toward career paths as early as middle school because of national testing. But Ali sought out opportunities wherever he could. In high school, he worked at a very early-stage startup and later founded an entrepreneurship club. The club received a grant and an invitation from Stanford to visit the university and meet Turkish leaders at firms in Silicon Valley. Ali later applied to Stanford, was accepted, and completed both his undergraduate and master’s degrees in Management Science and Engineering in four years.
He went on to work for McKinsey as a consultant, primarily with energy utilities. It was during that time, in his words, that he became “radicalized” toward the industry. After leaving McKinsey in 2021, he emailed the chairman of the board of GameStop, a struggling retailer that had suddenly become awash in cash. Following a phone conversation, Ali became the company’s corporate strategist. To push the company to profitability he led cost-cutting and operational discipline efforts.
He realized that reducing utility bills by 10%+ across GameStop stores would increase the company’s profits by a quarter, but the tools did not yet exist. Around that time, the first GPT model came out, and he realized the work of analyzing those bills could be automated and scaled with AI.
In 2023, Ali left GameStop and began exploring ideas in the utilities and energy financing spaces. He met Ozge Islegen-Wojdyla, also a Stanford graduate from Turkey, who had earned her PhD in energy pricing. Together, they co-founded TrueMeter in 2023. The company operates an AI Utility Management Platform to manage and lower utility bills for multi-location businesses.
We caught up with Ali as TrueMeter is now processing more than $25 million a year in utility bills and has delivered millions in savings to national brands
What is TrueMeter?
We lower and manage power bills for American businesses. We work with multi-unit chains, particularly across restaurants, hotels, and retailers. The way these companies pay for power is still very manual and archaic. Accountants often use pen and paper, spreadsheets, and emails to handle it. We know we can be a much lower-cost option to pay and book these bills, while actually lowering the utility spend.We often tell CFOs: we’ll pay your bills at cost, lower your bills, and charge on the savings we find. If we don’t find you any savings, we don’t make any money from you.
What advice would you give founders fundraising?
I think you have to treat investment money as a commodity. Run a tight process and talk to as many VCs as possible, just as VCs talk to multiple founders. Also, have a plan for the cash. Only raise if you truly believe that plan will work and that you need the cash to execute it.
What have been your recent milestones?
We raised our seed round in 2025, and since then, we’ve made some huge changes. We changed the name of the company to TrueMeter, rolled out enterprise-grade accounting and product controls, and started processing more than $25 million a year in utility bills. Many of those bills come from well-known chains, including McDonald’s, Marriott, and CloudKitchens.
What have been your biggest challenges?
One challenge, but also an opportunity, is that we are building a culture of continuous learning. All of us need to be on the cutting edge, investing in our education and understanding what new AI tools and models are coming to market before the builders of those tools probably even know. Every time a new AI model comes out, something in our product stack changes.
We are building TrueMeter in a way that doesn’t rely on one single model or one framework. We orchestrate across agents, have our own algorithms, and use our own proprietary standardization. But that also means that, out of 20 functions we do every week, we could be using a different tool to improve each function. It’s allowing us to keep the team small, and the energy is very exciting.
Secondly, the energy industry has suffered, and is still suffering, some big shocks. After we started building TrueMeter several utilities went bankrupt, the Venezuelan president got ousted to influence oil markets, and now there is the war in Iran that blocks 20%+ of the world’s energy supply. These are huge pricing shocks that underpin the trades and optimizations we do.
“The proliferation of data centers for AI has also noticeably increased power demand, and we estimate that power rates are going to keep increasing and eating more and more margin away from our customers.”
What’s it like working with Ulu Ventures?
Steve Reale has been on our board since June 2025. Ulu Ventures has a tenet that says, “we do no harm,” and I’ve certainly felt that from Steve. He’s always there whenever we need help and whenever I need to talk to him, but he’s never pushy. If we’re executing and in heads-down mode, he respects that. And whenever we’re ready to come up for air, he’s there to debrief with us.
What are your dreams for TrueMeter?
We will pay, audit and optimize every single power bill for American businesses. We see ourselves playing a big role in shifting the utility industry to be more honest. That’s why we renamed the company TrueMeter.
One out of six bills we pay for companies has an error on it that the utility is often made aware of. Making sure customers don’t overpay, helping them understand what they’re spending on, and doing this in a scalable way with AI is what we’re all about.
