ilayda bakare: From Mathematics and Art to Building Exhibits
The name ilayda bakare is increasingly associated with an unusual combination of mathematics, technology, art, entrepreneurship, and cultural exploration. Rather than following a conventional path in which technical and creative interests remain separate, she has brought those areas together through her work as the founder and mobile app developer behind Exhibits, a platform designed to make discovering exhibitions across London easier. Her journey is especially interesting because it was not built around an overnight breakthrough. Instead, it developed through years of learning, experimentation, problem-solving, and persistence.
Public information about ilayda bakare focuses primarily on her professional journey rather than on personal details such as her age, birthday, relationships, or private family life. What is well documented is that she studied mathematics, developed an interest in coding, taught herself skills needed for mobile application development, and spent approximately four years building Exhibits while balancing other work. The Roundhouse describes her as both a mathematician and an artist and notes that she combines technical knowledge with creative thinking.
That mixture makes her story relevant beyond the technology industry. It touches on the way people discover culture, how independent founders transform personal frustrations into products, and why unconventional combinations of skills can be valuable. Instead of seeing mathematics, art, technology, and museums as unrelated interests, ilayda bakare has treated them as parts of one larger creative process.
Who Is ilayda bakare?
ilayda bakare is a London-based entrepreneur, founder, creative professional, and self-taught mobile app developer best known for creating Exhibits. Her professional profiles describe her as the founder and developer of the platform, while the Roundhouse Creative Business Accelerator identifies her as one half of a Bakare-sister team behind the project.
Exhibits focuses on helping people discover temporary exhibitions and cultural experiences throughout London. Rather than forcing users to search numerous museum and gallery websites individually, the concept brings exhibition information together in one place. The Roundhouse described Exhibits as a free guide covering more than 100 exhibitions across London’s hundreds of cultural venues.
The idea reflects a practical problem familiar to many people living in or visiting a large city. London contains an enormous number of museums, galleries, historical spaces, scientific institutions, and cultural venues. Yet having many choices can make discovery surprisingly complicated. An exhibition may run for only a few weeks or months, and people can easily hear about something interesting after it has already finished.
The work of ilayda bakare attempts to reduce that problem. Exhibits is therefore not simply a technology project. It sits at the intersection of technology and cultural participation, using a digital tool to encourage people to spend more time engaging with physical spaces and real-world experiences.
The Mathematics Background of ilayda bakare
One of the most interesting aspects of the ilayda bakare story is her academic connection with mathematics. Her professional profile lists mathematics studies from 2015 to 2018, and other public descriptions identify her as a mathematician.
At first glance, mathematics and exhibition discovery might seem like completely different subjects. However, mathematics develops several abilities that can be extremely useful when building technology. Mathematical study encourages structured reasoning, breaking large problems into smaller parts, identifying patterns, testing assumptions, and searching for logical solutions.
Software development requires many of the same habits.
A developer building an application cannot simply imagine the finished product and immediately produce it. The project has to be separated into systems and smaller tasks. Information must be stored correctly. User actions need to trigger expected outcomes. Errors need to be identified and corrected. Features that work separately must eventually operate together.
This means the transition from mathematics toward coding is not as surprising as it may initially appear. The subject matter changes, but many underlying problem-solving skills remain useful.
For ilayda bakare, mathematics appears to have become one part of a broader identity rather than a narrow professional label. The Roundhouse specifically emphasizes the combination of her mathematical background and artistic interests, describing how she merges technical knowledge with creative vision while developing Exhibits.
ilayda bakare and Her Creative Side
Technology is only part of the story. ilayda bakare has also publicly described herself through creative work, with online profiles connecting her to art alongside application development. A separate creative profile associated with her describes interests including painting murals and designing tattoos while also identifying her as the founder and app developer behind Exhibits.
That creative background helps explain why the project is centered on exhibitions rather than being a purely technical utility.
Museums and exhibitions bring together visual art, history, science, photography, design, fashion, architecture, technology, and countless other subjects. Someone interested in both creative work and analytical thinking can therefore approach them from multiple directions.
The combination is also an example of how modern careers often refuse to fit neatly into a single category. A person can be interested in coding without abandoning art. Someone can study mathematics and later become an entrepreneur. A developer can care deeply about physical cultural spaces instead of focusing exclusively on digital experiences.
In the case of ilayda bakare, those overlapping interests appear to have helped define the identity of Exhibits.
How the Idea for Exhibits Developed
The motivation behind Exhibits reportedly grew from a familiar experience for the Bakare sisters: they enjoyed visiting exhibitions but found themselves repeatedly discovering interesting events too late. Public descriptions of the company explain that exhibitions had been part of their lives from childhood, when their family took them to cultural venues on weekends. As adults, however, they found that keeping track of London’s constantly changing exhibition calendar could be difficult.
That inconvenience became the basis for a business idea.
Many successful digital products begin in a similar way. A founder repeatedly encounters a problem, looks for an existing solution, and realizes that available options do not work quite the way they would like. Instead of accepting the inconvenience, the founder tries to create a better system.
For ilayda bakare, the problem was not a shortage of cultural experiences. London already had an extraordinary quantity of them. The problem was discovery.
Visitors needed a simpler way to understand what was currently available.
Exhibits was conceived as a way of bringing those opportunities together so users could spend less time searching and more time actually visiting museums, galleries, and cultural spaces. The Roundhouse summarizes the platform in similar terms, presenting it as a guide intended to simplify planning and make cultural exploration more personal and enjoyable.
Teaching Herself to Code
Perhaps the most notable part of the ilayda bakare journey is the amount of independent learning involved in building Exhibits.
The Roundhouse states that she spent four years teaching herself how to code while balancing two jobs and developing the application from scratch. A Women in STEM podcast profile similarly describes her journey from studying mathematics to learning coding and ultimately launching her own mobile application after roughly four years of work.
That detail changes how the story should be understood.
Creating an application is rarely one skill. Even relatively straightforward products can involve interface design, data handling, navigation, testing, debugging, deployment, maintenance, and decisions about how users interact with information.
For a founder teaching herself these skills, each new feature may introduce another area that must be understood.
A project therefore becomes both a product and an education.
Instead of completing a course and then beginning development with every required skill already mastered, an independent developer may learn in response to immediate problems. She might encounter an obstacle, research possible solutions, experiment with code, discover why one solution fails, and gradually build a working feature.
The four-year development period associated with Exhibits illustrates the persistence required for that type of process.
The Importance of Persistence in the ilayda bakare Story
The phrase “self-taught developer” can sometimes make the process sound easier than it really is. It may suggest someone simply watched a few tutorials and quickly created a finished application.
The documented timeline of ilayda bakare presents a very different picture.
Four years represents a substantial commitment to a single idea. During that time, technologies can change, motivation can fluctuate, bugs can become frustrating, and other responsibilities continue. The fact that she was reportedly balancing two jobs while working on Exhibits makes that commitment particularly significant.
Persistence matters because entrepreneurial projects frequently spend long periods in a stage that outsiders never see. People eventually encounter the finished application, company name, social media account, presentation, or public event. They do not see every abandoned idea, technical problem, redesign, or evening spent trying to understand why something does not work.
The ilayda bakare journey is therefore useful as an example of what building independently can involve. Progress does not always happen quickly, and a long development process does not automatically mean a project is failing.
Sometimes it means someone is learning enough to make the project possible.
The Role of Dilara Bakare
Although ilayda bakare is prominently associated with the original idea and development of Exhibits, the platform has also become a collaborative project involving her sister, Dilara Bakare.
A public company description explains that during development, İlayda encountered a difficult point in the coding process. Dilara, who had completed an Aerospace Engineering master’s degree, became involved and contributed her own technical and creative abilities. The description says Dilara learned graphic design and took responsibility for social media work, after which the sisters continued as co-founders.
The Roundhouse likewise describes İlayda as one half of the Bakare-sister duo behind Exhibits.
This collaboration adds another dimension to the project. Founding a company is often portrayed as an individual achievement, but successful products usually become increasingly collaborative as they develop.
One person may originate an idea, but design, communication, marketing, engineering, partnerships, research, and business development can eventually require different strengths.
The Bakare sisters appear to bring complementary skills to Exhibits while sharing the larger goal of helping people discover more of London’s cultural offerings.
What Does the Exhibits App Do?
At its simplest, Exhibits is designed to help users find exhibitions in London.
The Roundhouse profile of the company describes it as a free guide featuring more than 100 exhibitions across roughly 400 London venues, spanning subjects such as art, science, history, and culture.
The Apple App Store also lists Exhibits under ilayda bakare as its developer and describes the application around the idea of helping users avoid missing exhibitions.
That broad range of subjects is important.
The word “exhibition” can sometimes make people think exclusively about fine art, but exhibitions can cover almost anything. A visitor may be interested in ancient history, photography, football, fashion, natural science, technology, music, social history, architecture, film, or contemporary art.
By organizing discovery around interests rather than assuming every visitor wants the same type of museum experience, an exhibition platform can potentially reach people who do not consider themselves regular gallery visitors.
This supports one of the wider ideas behind Exhibits: cultural spaces can be relevant to far more people when they can easily discover something connected to their own interests.
Turning Digital Technology Into Real-World Exploration
One of the more distinctive qualities of the Exhibits concept is that the application is ultimately designed to encourage users to put their phones away and go somewhere.
Many technology companies compete for attention by trying to keep people inside an application for as long as possible. A cultural discovery tool operates differently. Its success can lead a person away from the screen and into a museum, gallery, historical building, or exhibition space.
That gives the work of ilayda bakare an interesting position within digital culture.
The technology is a bridge rather than the final destination.
The app helps someone discover an exhibition, but the meaningful experience occurs when that person walks through the doors of a venue, sees an artwork in person, encounters an object from history, learns about a scientific development, or has a conversation with someone they came with.
Public descriptions associated with Exhibits emphasize this connection between cultural activity and meaningful real-world experiences.
ilayda bakare and London’s Museum Culture
London is particularly suited to a project like Exhibits because of the enormous variety of cultural institutions located across the city.
The challenge is not simply finding famous museums. Most visitors already know about some of London’s major institutions. The harder task is keeping up with temporary exhibitions and discovering smaller or less familiar venues.
Temporary programming changes continuously.
An exhibition that is available today may disappear in several weeks. A new exhibition may open with little awareness outside a particular cultural community. Someone can live in London for years and still regularly discover museums and galleries they had never previously heard about.
Exhibits attempts to make this changing cultural landscape easier to navigate.
That approach also makes ilayda bakare part of a broader movement toward cultural discovery tools that emphasize convenience, personalization, and accessibility of information.
From Developer to Entrepreneur
Building an application and building a company are different challenges.
A developer can focus heavily on whether the technology functions correctly. An entrepreneur also needs to think about audiences, branding, communication, growth, partnerships, finance, business models, and the long-term direction of the product.
The professional development of ilayda bakare demonstrates that transition.
In 2025, she was selected as part of the Roundhouse Creative Business Accelerator cohort. The programme supports creative entrepreneurs between the ages of 18 and 30 through workshops, mentoring, masterclasses, pitch practice, peer learning, business support, and access to workspace.
Bakare publicly described joining the accelerator as an opportunity to give Exhibits a stronger commercial foundation and discussed preparing to pitch the company alongside other members of the cohort.
Participation in a programme like this represents a different stage of entrepreneurship. The question is no longer simply, “Can this product be built?” It becomes, “How can this product become sustainable?”
The Roundhouse Creative Business Accelerator
The Roundhouse Creative Business Accelerator offers useful context for understanding where ilayda bakare has taken Exhibits after developing the initial technology.
According to the Roundhouse, the programme is designed to help emerging creative entrepreneurs build sustainable and scalable businesses. Participants receive several months of workshops, mentoring, business education, pitching experience, and interaction with other founders.
For a technically minded founder, this kind of environment can introduce perspectives that coding alone cannot provide.
A product may function beautifully and still struggle commercially.
Entrepreneurs need to understand the people they serve, determine how they will reach those users, explain why the product matters, make financial decisions, build partnerships, and present their vision clearly to others.
Bakare has spoken positively about learning from people with different backgrounds and perspectives during her accelerator experience. In one public reflection, she emphasized the usefulness of diversity in entrepreneurship and the value of examining problems through different lenses.
That perspective fits naturally with a multidisciplinary career that already combines mathematics, art, development, culture, and business.
ilayda bakare as a Speaker
As Exhibits has developed, ilayda bakare has also become more visible as a speaker discussing application development and entrepreneurship.
Her public profile identifies her as a keynote speaker as well as the founder and app developer of Exhibits.
In 2026, she also promoted an event where she planned to discuss how she built her application from scratch, sharing the stage with creative technologist and gaming-industry figure Danielle Udogaranya.
That evolution from learner to speaker is significant.
Someone who once had to figure out mobile development independently can eventually become the person explaining that journey to others.
It does not mean every difficulty disappears. Rather, experience becomes something that can be shared with founders and aspiring developers who are standing at an earlier stage of the same process.
Why the ilayda bakare Journey Stands Out
There are several reasons the story of ilayda bakare attracts attention.
First, her career does not fit a simple professional label. She has a mathematics background but is also associated with visual creativity. She taught herself coding but went on to build a product centered on physical cultural experiences. She started as a developer solving a personal problem and has increasingly taken on the role of entrepreneur and speaker.
Second, the development of Exhibits demonstrates persistence.
Spending years learning enough to build an application is very different from simply having an idea for one. Ideas are abundant. Turning an idea into something people can actually use requires sustained effort.
Third, her project addresses a straightforward but meaningful problem. People want to experience interesting things in their city, but discovering those opportunities takes time. Technology can reduce that friction.
Finally, the journey illustrates the value of interdisciplinary thinking. Mathematics does not have to lead only toward traditionally mathematical careers. Art does not need to remain separate from technology. Coding does not have to produce products that exist entirely online.
When those interests are combined, they can create something that would be difficult to imagine from within only one field.
What Aspiring Developers Can Learn From ilayda bakare
The experience of ilayda bakare offers useful lessons for people interested in technology but unsure whether they have followed the “correct” route.
The first lesson is that learning can continue after formal education.
Bakare’s documented path from mathematics toward self-taught application development demonstrates that an academic background does not permanently determine someone’s professional direction.
The second lesson is that projects can guide learning.
Trying to build something real creates specific questions. Instead of learning every possible programming concept before beginning, aspiring developers often develop their abilities by solving problems connected with a real project.
The third lesson is persistence.
A four-year journey is a reminder that significant projects can require patience.
The fourth lesson is that technical ability is only one part of creating something useful. Understanding the problem matters just as much.
Exhibits was not created merely because someone wanted to demonstrate coding ability. It emerged from a genuine frustration: interesting cultural experiences were too easy to miss.
What Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Her Story
Entrepreneurs can also draw broader lessons from the ilayda bakare journey.
A strong idea often starts with a real inconvenience.
Founders who deeply understand a problem may have an advantage because they have personally experienced the frustration they are attempting to solve.
It is also helpful to begin with a focused purpose. Exhibits is not trying to solve every tourism or entertainment problem. Its identity is built around exhibitions and cultural discovery.
Another lesson concerns collaboration.
The project evolved into a sister-led effort, with Dilara Bakare bringing additional abilities to the company.
Finally, entrepreneurs eventually need skills beyond product development. Bakare’s participation in the Roundhouse accelerator illustrates the transition from creating a tool toward developing a sustainable business around it.
Why Representation in Technology Matters
Bakare has also publicly discussed diversity and representation within professional and entrepreneurial environments.
While reflecting on her accelerator experience, she wrote about the importance of encountering people from different backgrounds and disciplines and noted that women and people of colour are not always positioned as authorities within professional spaces. She connected diverse perspectives with the ability to approach entrepreneurial problems differently.
Her visibility as a founder and mobile developer therefore has significance beyond one application.
Technology benefits when people with different experiences are able to participate in creating products. Different founders notice different problems. They understand different communities. They may approach design, communication, accessibility, culture, or user behavior in ways that would otherwise be overlooked.
Diversity is therefore not only about who appears in the technology industry. It can also influence what gets built.
The Future Potential of Exhibits
The future direction of Exhibits will depend on decisions made by its founders, and it would be inappropriate to present unannounced expansion plans as fact.
However, the underlying concept has clear room for continued development.
Cultural discovery is an ongoing problem because exhibition schedules never stop changing. New displays open, old ones close, museums introduce new programmes, and users develop different interests.
As a result, the value of a discovery platform depends heavily on remaining current, easy to use, and relevant.
The company also sits in an interesting space between culture and technology. Its long-term opportunities could be shaped by how effectively the founders deepen relationships with users and cultural institutions while retaining the approachable identity that originally inspired the product.
What is already established is that ilayda bakare has moved the project beyond an idea. Exhibits is publicly listed as a mobile application, and she has continued representing it through entrepreneurial programmes and public speaking.
Public Interest in ilayda bakare
As her professional visibility grows, people searching for ilayda bakare may naturally look for information about her age, nationality, family, education, career, and background.
At present, reliable public sources provide considerably more detail about her professional activities than her private life.
This distinction is important because online biographies sometimes fill information gaps with assumptions. Without reliable confirmation, details such as exact age, birthday, relationship status, net worth, or other private information should not be presented as established facts.
What can be stated with greater confidence is that her public career centers on mathematics, creative work, self-taught software development, entrepreneurship, Exhibits, and cultural discovery in London.
That professional story is substantial enough without inventing personal details.
Is ilayda bakare the Same Person as Laide Bakare?
No. People searching the surname may encounter information about Laide Bakare, a Nigerian actress and film producer, but that is a different person.
The ilayda bakare discussed here is associated with London, mobile application development, mathematics, creative work, and Exhibits. Public professional sources identify İlayda Bakare specifically as the founder and mobile app developer behind the cultural discovery platform.
Keeping the two names separate is important when researching her career.
A Modern Example of Combining STEM and Creativity
One of the strongest themes running throughout the story of ilayda bakare is that technical and creative interests do not have to compete with one another.
STEM careers are sometimes presented as purely analytical while artistic careers are described as purely imaginative. In practice, many of the most interesting products require both.
An application needs functioning code, but it also needs an understandable interface.
A company needs financial logic, but it also needs a compelling identity.
A cultural platform needs accurate information, but it also needs to make people feel curious enough to explore.
The professional profile of ilayda bakare sits directly in this overlap. The Roundhouse’s description of her as both mathematician and artist captures the central idea particularly well.
Her background demonstrates how analytical reasoning can support creativity rather than restrict it.
Building Something Because You Wish It Existed
Perhaps the simplest way to understand the work of ilayda bakare is through the idea of building a product she wanted to use herself.
She and her sister enjoyed exhibitions. They experienced the frustration of missing them. The existing process of discovering what was happening across London did not fully solve that frustration. So the problem eventually became an application idea.
This is a classic entrepreneurial pattern, but it remains powerful.
Products are often strongest when their creators understand the user because they were originally users themselves.
Such founders know where the inconvenience occurs. They understand what feels unnecessarily complicated. They have experienced the disappointment that motivates the proposed solution.
For Exhibits, that disappointment was discovering an interesting exhibition after it had ended.
The proposed answer was simple in principle: make exhibitions easier to find before people miss them.
Turning that simple concept into working technology was the difficult part.
The Growing Professional Identity of ilayda bakare
The public profile of ilayda bakare now extends beyond simply being the person who coded an application.
She is described as a founder, developer and speaker. She has participated in an accelerator aimed at scaling creative businesses, represented Exhibits publicly, discussed diversity and entrepreneurship, and spoken about the process of building technology independently.
This evolution is typical of founders who remain deeply involved with their products.
Early on, the challenge may be learning how to build.
Later, it becomes explaining the idea.
After that comes building a team, developing a business model, forming partnerships, understanding an audience, and deciding what the company should become.
Bakare’s story is still developing, which means any biography written today represents a particular stage rather than a completed career.
Final Thoughts on ilayda bakare
The story of ilayda bakare is ultimately about combining interests that might initially appear unrelated.
Mathematics provided an analytical foundation. Art contributed creativity. A personal interest in exhibitions revealed a practical problem. Coding provided a way to address that problem. Years of self-directed learning turned the idea into an application. Collaboration with her sister helped expand the project, while entrepreneurial programmes and speaking opportunities have taken the journey into a broader professional stage.
Exhibits also represents an appealing contradiction within modern technology: it uses a digital product to encourage people to experience more of the physical world.
Rather than asking users to remain endlessly engaged with another screen, its purpose is to help them find something interesting and then visit it.
That connection between technology, curiosity, and culture gives the project its distinctive identity.
For people encountering the name ilayda bakare for the first time, the most useful description is therefore not simply “app developer” or “entrepreneur.” She represents a multidisciplinary approach in which mathematics, programming, art, cultural discovery, and business development contribute to the same goal.
Her progress also offers a practical reminder for aspiring creators. A person does not necessarily need to begin with every skill required to build an idea. Skills can be learned. Difficulties can be solved gradually. Collaborators can strengthen areas where a founder needs support. Business knowledge can be developed alongside technical knowledge.
What matters is moving from an interesting idea toward something real.
In the case of ilayda bakare, that process took years of self-teaching and development, eventually resulting in Exhibits and a growing presence within London’s creative technology and entrepreneurship community. Her career remains in progress, making future developments around both her work and the platform worth following.
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