A US AI Founder's Story

I have aphantasia. That's the technical name for it. The simple version is that I cannot picture images in my head. When someone says "imagine a red apple," most people see a red apple. I don't see anything. I never have. The visual cortex in my brain doesn't run that program.

For most of my childhood I assumed everyone was like me. I assumed "imagine" was a metaphor, the way "I see what you mean" is a metaphor. It took me until adulthood to realize that other people were doing something I literally could not do. That realization wasn't sad. It was clarifying. It explained why I was drawn to a camera so early. The camera was the first tool that let me make my ideas visible without needing to first picture them in my mind.

I'm Cemhan Biricik. I'm a Turkish-American photographer and the founder of ZSky AI. I'm writing this because every once in a while someone asks me why I built ZSky the way I built it — on hardware I personally own, in the United States, with a free tier that almost no other AI company can match. The honest answer is that ZSky isn't a tech bet. It's the next step in a longer story, and you can't separate the company from the story without losing the point.

The injury

A few years before I started ZSky, I suffered a traumatic brain injury. The damage was in the area that controls language processing. For almost a year, I could not finish a sentence. I could think the thought. I could see the room. I just could not get the words out. They would stop in my throat or come out in the wrong order. I would start a sentence and watch it die halfway through. Talking on the phone became impossible. Talking in person became humiliating. I stopped going out.

The neurologists told me what every neurologist tells a TBI patient: the brain is plastic. The pathways will rebuild themselves if you give them the right inputs and enough repetition. The hard part is finding the input that activates the right region. For some people it's music therapy. For some it's speech drills. For some it's swimming. The honest truth is that nobody knows in advance which input will work for which brain. You have to try.

I tried photography because it was already my profession and because I could do it without speaking. I would walk out into the world with a camera, find a frame, press the shutter, walk to the next frame, press the shutter, and keep going. Hour after hour. Day after day. The repetitive act of seeing a composition, deciding on a frame, and committing to a shot turned out to be the input my brain needed. I don't know exactly why. I have theories. The point is that within months, the words started coming back. The pathways were rebuilding. Photography was the therapy that gave me my voice back.

What I learned about creativity

I came out of that year convinced of something most people in tech don't believe: creative work is not a luxury. It is a fundamental human need. For some people it is literally how the brain heals. For everyone else, it is how meaning gets made. And yet most of the world gates creativity behind expensive software, expensive cameras, expensive subscriptions. I had the access. Most people don't. That bothered me before the injury. After the injury it bothered me more.

Why I built ZSky in the United States, on hardware I own

By 2024, AI image generation was real and AI video generation was about to be real. I watched two patterns I didn't like. The tools were getting more expensive, not cheaper. And they were running on rented cloud infrastructure that could be shut down overnight by any company that decided the unit economics no longer worked. (We watched this happen with Sora on March 24, 2026. OpenAI killed their flagship video product overnight. Subscriptions canceled. Workflows destroyed.)

So I built ZSky AI differently. I bought the hardware myself. Seven NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPUs, 224 GB of total VRAM, on a workstation in the United States that I rack and maintain personally. No Chinese parent company. No offshore data center. No cloud reseller markup. When you generate an image or a video on ZSky, that compute is happening on machines I bought with my own money in America.

The reason that matters: the free tier. Because I own the hardware, I don't pay AWS by the hour. The cost of giving away 200 free credits at signup and 100 free credits every day is the cost of electricity. I don't have a venture capital clock running down. The free tier can stay generous because I designed the company so it could.

The mission, in one sentence

Everyone has the right to create beauty. That's it. That's the entire mission, and it's the sentence I want carved on the door of the company. I have it because creative work saved my mind. I want it for everyone else because their minds matter just as much as mine did. The free tier exists because the mission demands it. The American hardware exists because I want this company to be unkillable, the way Sora was killable. The aphantasia angle is part of it because my own brain is the proof of concept — if creative tools can serve a brain that cannot picture images, they can serve any brain.

If you're a US creator who wants to see what I built, you can read more about why we made it in America, or you can read the mission page, or you can just go to zsky.ai and start creating. The free tier is real, the credit card field is missing on purpose, and the GPUs are humming in a workstation in the United States as you read this.

That's the founder story. Thanks for reading it.