Photo: Digital Business, соцсети героев
Alpamys Makazhan is 18, and his open-source project Soup has raised $2 million. His is one of three stories about young Kazakhstanis in tech that Digital Business has covered over the past two days. The other two are 19 and 20.
Makazhan: $2 million to train neural networks on an ordinary laptop
Alpamys Makazhan studies at Astana IT University and features in Digital Business’s “20 Under 20: Kazakhstan’s Next Generation of Leaders” ranking. He launched Soup in 2026 with co-founder Rafik Mamedov.
Soup is an open-source tool for post-training AI models. Post-training means adapting an existing neural network to a specific task: teaching it to respond in a particular style, work through legal documents or understand industry terminology. This usually involves renting servers with powerful graphics cards, one of the biggest expenses for small AI teams. According to Japanese publication GIGAZINE, Soup can post-train an 8-billion-parameter model on a graphics card with 4 GB of memory, meaning an ordinary laptop.
The code is freely available on GitHub. In three months, the project picked up around 10 thousand stars, with more than 190 programmers from around the world contributing to its development. That is a strong showing for an open-source project: developers give stars to projects they find useful.
Who invested and what the company is worth
The $2 million round was led by Bitfury, a technology company that started out making mining equipment and now invests in AI infrastructure. Investors include Bill Tai, Zoom’s first investor and an early backer of Canva. The company was valued at $10 million.
Soup has no revenue yet: the project is free, and investors are betting on the developer community around it. The money will go towards the team, with plans to grow from 10 to 20 people. Some employees will move to Silicon Valley.
Sailaukan: AI agents for oil and grain deals
Shakhnazar Sailaukan is 20 and comes from Pavlodar. He is a co-founder of Rixt.ai, a startup that raised $250 thousand in the US from Entrepreneurs First and Transpose Platform. Entrepreneurs First is a London-based fund that seeks out strong technical founders at the earliest stage, often before they have a product.
Rixt.ai builds AI agents for trading commodities: metals, oil, gas and grain. Commodity deals involve a lot of manual work: finding suppliers, comparing prices, preparing documents and tracking shipments. An AI agent handles some of these steps, while the trader checks the results and makes the decision.
Sarzhigitov: from figure skating to a Kazakhstani unicorn
Alpamys Sarzhigitov is 19 and comes from Aktobe. He took up figure skating at seven and earned the Candidate for Master of Sport title at 16. He left the sport because of health problems and started programming.
He is now Higgsfield’s youngest engineer. The company, whose founders are from Kazakhstan, makes an AI video creation service and was valued at $5.4 billion in August 2026. Eight months earlier, its valuation was $1.3 billion.
18, 19, 20
Three different stories: open source, commodity trading and AI video. What connects them is their age and the fact that all three have worked for a global market from day one. Makazhan is building a community on GitHub, Sailaukan is raising money in the US, and Sarzhigitov writes code for a company used around the world.
Coincidence, or is a new generation really emerging in Kazakhstan’s tech industry? Tell us who else belongs on this list.
Sources: Digital Business (November 9 and 10, 2026), GIGAZINE.
