The participants were taught by TikTok for Business experts for five days. Twenty participants successfully passed the exam and attended offline workshops in Astana, and presented their projects to the experts. The Academy's best students were named: Alamata Store, iDOS Games, QazaqSchool online, Zhannura Jewellery, Tastamat, Robotech, Ecomade, and Oila.App, and Smart City.

"We're thrilled that our first TikTok Startup Academy has aroused great interest from the startup community in Kazakhstan. We met many talented entrepreneurs with bright eyes, and a desire to learn and scale their businesses using the innovative TikTok for Business. We were It’s not easy to choose the startups that will receive grants for TikTok marketing campaigns, but we tried to choose the most deserving ones. Grants were received by 9 startups whose representatives prepared the highest quality strategies, showed understanding of the market and TikTok products, as well as activity and involvement in workshops.", - shared Anastasia Panina, CEO of Global Business Solutions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, TikTok.

The startups, who received unique knowledge from experts and discovered the possibilities of the TikTok platform, shared their impressions and plans for the future.

"When we learned about the selection for the TikTok StartUp Academy training, we immediately applied and were eager to gain knowledge directly from the platform representatives. We are happy that we passed all the stages of the selection process, got valuable knowledge about business promotion in TikTok, and successfully passed the assessment. It allowed us to create and present our strategy and win a grant to promote in the most advanced social media", - said Aigul Sherniyazova, head of the department of Tastamat.

Program participants noted that the Academy gave insight not only into the platform's advertising tools but also into the advertising strategy of the product as a whole. For example, the startup OILA.app, which develops an app for children, shared how they will spend the grant they received.

"Our startup, an educational app OILA.app, relies on social media as its primary marketing channel to attract customers. Therefore, a deep understanding of TikTok's advertising tools is essential to us. The grant we received allows us to conduct advertising campaigns to obtain the primary data, based on which we can build a scalable model and take the product to the next stage of development," said Baglan Ayazbayev, founder of the startup OILA.app.

The TikTok StartUp Academy program started in October 2022. Academy students with experts from TikTok For Business learned how to launch effective campaigns and received unique educational content and expertise from the leading web platform.