As part of AI Month, the winners of HackAlem AI, the world’s largest AI hackathon, were honored at an awards ceremony. The ceremony was held as part of the program of NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s visit to Astana.
The HackAlem AI winners had the opportunity to meet Jensen Huang in person and take a group photo with him. The awards ceremony marked the closing event of AI Month, a large-scale series of events bringing together Kazakhstan’s key initiatives in artificial intelligence.
HackAlem AI took place on September 23, 2026, and set a new GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS™ title for the largest number of participants in an AI hackathon, bringing together 2,415 participants. Of the 1,066 solutions submitted, experts selected 60 projects for the final, where the teams presented their solutions at Demo Day on October 16.
Main Track Winners
Telecommunications
1st place — PalliPalli — PalliPalli Solution for Beeline, a tariff campaign agent.
2nd place — Flora — an agent for tariff marketing campaigns.
3rd place — andreidev — Campaign Cockpit, an AI assistant for telecom operators that determines which tariff plan to offer each customer and tests its hypotheses.
Finance
1st place — TAMYR — Money Graph, a tool for AML analysts that builds transaction graphs, identifies participants’ roles, and shows which entities should be investigated first.
2nd place — UNRU AI — MoneyGraph Investigator, a system that analyzes money-transfer networks, identifies priority nodes for investigation, and explains hypotheses about their roles.
3rd place — Neverlose — a system that analyzes money transfers, builds relationship graphs, generates hypotheses about participants’ roles, and helps prioritize investigations.
Logistics
1st place — Light — Smart Procurement, a system that predicts product shortages before they disrupt sales.
2nd place — ShoqanTandau — a service that generates supplier orders from 1C data in seconds, taking into account seasonality, shortages, and goods in transit.
3rd place — GrimStack — a service for procurement managers that calculates orders for each SKU based on 1C exports, taking into account demand, inventory, and goods in transit.
Retail
1st place — Zhigitter — Komplekt AI, an AI sales assistant for an electrical goods store that selects products and guides customers through to a confirmed shopping cart.
2nd place — SAQ Digital — EKT Assistant, an AI assistant that selects electrical products based on text, photos, or specifications, displays prices and availability, and builds a shopping cart.
3rd place — Survae — an AI consultant for electrical goods stores that clarifies the customer’s needs, assembles a product set from the catalog, and adds it to the cart upon confirmation.
Innovation
1st place — KaskyrAlmaty — Hattama, a service that turns meetings in Kazakh and Russian into minutes with tasks, assignees, and deadlines.
2nd place — BBC — Hattama, a local AI assistant that converts recordings of meetings in Russian and Kazakh into draft minutes with tasks and deadlines.
3rd place — Alabala – ToU — QORIT, an application that converts audio recordings of meetings in Russian and Kazakh into minutes with tasks and deadlines.
Energy
1st place — Gjgj — Wind48, an AI agent that monitors weather conditions, filters out inaccurate forecasts, and provides dispatchers with a ready-to-use daily plan explaining its decisions.
2nd place — RentBox — WindCast, an autonomous system that collects updated weather forecasts daily and provides hourly turbine power-generation forecasts for the next 24–48 hours.
3rd place — KAYO — an AI agent that generates hourly wind farm power-generation forecasts for the next two days.
Communications
1st place — DIR ECHOES — a voice-based insurance assistant that selects the appropriate option from 40 scenarios, collects data, and transfers the customer to a human operator when necessary.
2nd place — doter — a voice AI agent for insurance services.
3rd place — Latex — a hybrid voice AI agent for an insurance company’s contact center that understands Russian and Kazakh speech and selects the appropriate option from 40 scenarios.
Education
1st place — GhostTech — a local MVP platform connecting entrepreneurs with business challenges to student teams interested in working on their projects.
2nd place — Larda — a platform where AI helps businesses formulate challenges while student teams solve them and build their portfolios.
3rd place — archibalt — a platform where businesses describe a challenge in their own words, while the system turns it into a clear technical specification and helps find a student team.
Management
1st place — AIVIOM — Career Quest, an AI career navigator that identifies the skills needed for a target role and creates a personalized learning path.
2nd place — Sudack — Career Quest, an AI career navigator that helps employees choose their next development steps while giving HR teams an overview of the workforce.
3rd place — Meta Juniors — Career Quest, an AI career navigator that recommends career development steps to employees and shows HR teams where skills gaps exist.
Creative Industries
1st place — ITshich — QALAU, a contractor selection service for an event aggregator that provides up to three options and explains each recommendation.
2nd place — The Power of Dreams — Join City, a service for selecting event contractors in Kazakhstan that recommends up to three options with explanations.
3rd place — VibeOps — an AI assistant that clarifies a client’s requirements and selects up to three event contractors from a catalog, explaining each recommendation.
Special Track Winners
Astana Innovations
1st place — Ascension — an interactive AI-powered city management simulator featuring five initiatives within a fixed budget and their impact on five districts of Astana.
2nd place — Astra the best — Akim for 5 Hours, an educational Astana management simulator based on a 3D map, where users must allocate a KZT 10 billion budget across five initiatives.
3rd place — Lossless — an AI-powered urban decision-making simulator that allows users to allocate a budget among different district development strategies and assess their impact on quality of life.
The Astana Innovations track had a $10,000 cash prize pool: $5,000 for first place, $3,000 for second place, and $2,000 for third place.
Kazakhtelecom
1st place — Singularity — OrgDiff, an AI agent for analyzing organizational structures and functions.
2nd place — Optimus — OrgScope, an AI agent that compares organizational structure documents before and after restructuring and identifies lost functions and duplication.
3rd place — Amazing Guys — Kontur, an AI service that compares organizational documents before and after restructuring and identifies lost functions, duplication, and conflicting roles.
In the special Kazakhtelecom track, the winners receive access to the computing resources of the AI-Farabium supercomputer worth a total of $10,000: $5,000 for first place, $3,000 for second place, and $2,000 for third place.
Special NVIDIA Awards
NVIDIA provided additional awards to HackAlem AI participants, recognizing three teams in special categories for their use of local AI solutions and technologies.
The NVIDIA Sovereign AI award went to BBC, which developed a solution featuring its own speech recognition model for Russian and Kazakh and a local LLM operating entirely offline. The team received an NVIDIA DGX Spark mini AI supercomputer.
The NVIDIA Accelerated AI award went to Alabala – ToU, whose solution uses its own recognition model built with NVIDIA NeMo, NeMo diarization on CUDA, and Gemma 12B via llama.cpp. The team also received an NVIDIA DGX Spark mini AI supercomputer.
The NVIDIA Vision & Generative AI award went to Singularity. Its solution uses local computer vision to recognize scanned documents and images offline with PaddleOCR in ONNX, without cloud services or API keys. The team received an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card.
The prize pool for HackAlem AI’s 10 main tracks totaled $200,000: $100,000 in cash prizes from Astana Hub and $100,000 in technology resources from OpenAI. Additional prizes were provided for the Astana Innovations and Kazakhtelecom special tracks.
HackAlem AI brought together the technology community of Kazakhstan and other countries and became one of the key initiatives of AI Month. Hackathon participants received access to technology and educational resources worth up to $1.5 million in total from OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Arizona State University.
HackAlem AI was organized and supported by the Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the Akimat of the City of Astana, Astana Hub International Innovation Cluster, Silkroad Innovation Hub, Blockchain & AI Technology Center (BAITC), AI & Digital Bridge, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Arizona State University, Palo Alto Networks, MSSP.GLOBAL, and Romanovsky Product.
HackAlem AI sponsors included Samruk-Kazyna Sovereign Wealth Fund JSC, Freedom Holding Corp., Kaspi.kz JSC, Halyk Bank of Kazakhstan JSC (Halyk Bank), Kazakhtelecom JSC, Transtelecom JSC, Beeline Kazakhstan, and Firebird Inc.
As part of AI Month, the winners of HackAlem AI, the world’s largest AI hackathon, were honored at an awards ceremony. The ceremony was held as part of the program of NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s visit to Astana.
The HackAlem AI winners had the opportunity to meet Jensen Huang in person and take a group photo with him. The awards ceremony marked the closing event of AI Month, a large-scale series of events bringing together Kazakhstan’s key initiatives in artificial intelligence.
HackAlem AI took place on September 23, 2026, and set a new GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS™ title for the largest number of participants in an AI hackathon, bringing together 2,415 participants. Of the 1,066 solutions submitted, experts selected 60 projects for the final, where the teams presented their solutions at Demo Day on October 16.
Main Track Winners
Telecommunications
1st place — PalliPalli — PalliPalli Solution for Beeline, a tariff campaign agent.
2nd place — Flora — an agent for tariff marketing campaigns.
3rd place — andreidev — Campaign Cockpit, an AI assistant for telecom operators that determines which tariff plan to offer each customer and tests its hypotheses.
Finance
1st place — TAMYR — Money Graph, a tool for AML analysts that builds transaction graphs, identifies participants’ roles, and shows which entities should be investigated first.
2nd place — UNRU AI — MoneyGraph Investigator, a system that analyzes money-transfer networks, identifies priority nodes for investigation, and explains hypotheses about their roles.
3rd place — Neverlose — a system that analyzes money transfers, builds relationship graphs, generates hypotheses about participants’ roles, and helps prioritize investigations.
Logistics
1st place — Light — Smart Procurement, a system that predicts product shortages before they disrupt sales.
2nd place — ShoqanTandau — a service that generates supplier orders from 1C data in seconds, taking into account seasonality, shortages, and goods in transit.
3rd place — GrimStack — a service for procurement managers that calculates orders for each SKU based on 1C exports, taking into account demand, inventory, and goods in transit.
Retail
1st place — Zhigitter — Komplekt AI, an AI sales assistant for an electrical goods store that selects products and guides customers through to a confirmed shopping cart.
2nd place — SAQ Digital — EKT Assistant, an AI assistant that selects electrical products based on text, photos, or specifications, displays prices and availability, and builds a shopping cart.
3rd place — Survae — an AI consultant for electrical goods stores that clarifies the customer’s needs, assembles a product set from the catalog, and adds it to the cart upon confirmation.
Innovation
1st place — KaskyrAlmaty — Hattama, a service that turns meetings in Kazakh and Russian into minutes with tasks, assignees, and deadlines.
2nd place — BBC — Hattama, a local AI assistant that converts recordings of meetings in Russian and Kazakh into draft minutes with tasks and deadlines.
3rd place — Alabala – ToU — QORIT, an application that converts audio recordings of meetings in Russian and Kazakh into minutes with tasks and deadlines.
Energy
1st place — Gjgj — Wind48, an AI agent that monitors weather conditions, filters out inaccurate forecasts, and provides dispatchers with a ready-to-use daily plan explaining its decisions.
2nd place — RentBox — WindCast, an autonomous system that collects updated weather forecasts daily and provides hourly turbine power-generation forecasts for the next 24–48 hours.
3rd place — KAYO — an AI agent that generates hourly wind farm power-generation forecasts for the next two days.
Communications
1st place — DIR ECHOES — a voice-based insurance assistant that selects the appropriate option from 40 scenarios, collects data, and transfers the customer to a human operator when necessary.
2nd place — doter — a voice AI agent for insurance services.
3rd place — Latex — a hybrid voice AI agent for an insurance company’s contact center that understands Russian and Kazakh speech and selects the appropriate option from 40 scenarios.
Education
1st place — GhostTech — a local MVP platform connecting entrepreneurs with business challenges to student teams interested in working on their projects.
2nd place — Larda — a platform where AI helps businesses formulate challenges while student teams solve them and build their portfolios.
3rd place — archibalt — a platform where businesses describe a challenge in their own words, while the system turns it into a clear technical specification and helps find a student team.
Management
1st place — AIVIOM — Career Quest, an AI career navigator that identifies the skills needed for a target role and creates a personalized learning path.
2nd place — Sudack — Career Quest, an AI career navigator that helps employees choose their next development steps while giving HR teams an overview of the workforce.
3rd place — Meta Juniors — Career Quest, an AI career navigator that recommends career development steps to employees and shows HR teams where skills gaps exist.
Creative Industries
1st place — ITshich — QALAU, a contractor selection service for an event aggregator that provides up to three options and explains each recommendation.
2nd place — The Power of Dreams — Join City, a service for selecting event contractors in Kazakhstan that recommends up to three options with explanations.
3rd place — VibeOps — an AI assistant that clarifies a client’s requirements and selects up to three event contractors from a catalog, explaining each recommendation.
Special Track Winners
Astana Innovations
1st place — Ascension — an interactive AI-powered city management simulator featuring five initiatives within a fixed budget and their impact on five districts of Astana.
2nd place — Astra the best — Akim for 5 Hours, an educational Astana management simulator based on a 3D map, where users must allocate a KZT 10 billion budget across five initiatives.
3rd place — Lossless — an AI-powered urban decision-making simulator that allows users to allocate a budget among different district development strategies and assess their impact on quality of life.
The Astana Innovations track had a $10,000 cash prize pool: $5,000 for first place, $3,000 for second place, and $2,000 for third place.
Kazakhtelecom
1st place — Singularity — OrgDiff, an AI agent for analyzing organizational structures and functions.
2nd place — Optimus — OrgScope, an AI agent that compares organizational structure documents before and after restructuring and identifies lost functions and duplication.
3rd place — Amazing Guys — Kontur, an AI service that compares organizational documents before and after restructuring and identifies lost functions, duplication, and conflicting roles.
In the special Kazakhtelecom track, the winners receive access to the computing resources of the AI-Farabium supercomputer worth a total of $10,000: $5,000 for first place, $3,000 for second place, and $2,000 for third place.
Special NVIDIA Awards
NVIDIA provided additional awards to HackAlem AI participants, recognizing three teams in special categories for their use of local AI solutions and technologies.
The NVIDIA Sovereign AI award went to BBC, which developed a solution featuring its own speech recognition model for Russian and Kazakh and a local LLM operating entirely offline. The team received an NVIDIA DGX Spark mini AI supercomputer.
The NVIDIA Accelerated AI award went to Alabala – ToU, whose solution uses its own recognition model built with NVIDIA NeMo, NeMo diarization on CUDA, and Gemma 12B via llama.cpp. The team also received an NVIDIA DGX Spark mini AI supercomputer.
The NVIDIA Vision & Generative AI award went to Singularity. Its solution uses local computer vision to recognize scanned documents and images offline with PaddleOCR in ONNX, without cloud services or API keys. The team received an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card.
The prize pool for HackAlem AI’s 10 main tracks totaled $200,000: $100,000 in cash prizes from Astana Hub and $100,000 in technology resources from OpenAI. Additional prizes were provided for the Astana Innovations and Kazakhtelecom special tracks.
HackAlem AI brought together the technology community of Kazakhstan and other countries and became one of the key initiatives of AI Month. Hackathon participants received access to technology and educational resources worth up to $1.5 million in total from OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Arizona State University.
HackAlem AI was organized and supported by the Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the Akimat of the City of Astana, Astana Hub International Innovation Cluster, Silkroad Innovation Hub, Blockchain & AI Technology Center (BAITC), AI & Digital Bridge, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Arizona State University, Palo Alto Networks, MSSP.GLOBAL, and Romanovsky Product.
HackAlem AI sponsors included Samruk-Kazyna Sovereign Wealth Fund JSC, Freedom Holding Corp., Kaspi.kz JSC, Halyk Bank of Kazakhstan JSC (Halyk Bank), Kazakhtelecom JSC, Transtelecom JSC, Beeline Kazakhstan, and Firebird Inc.
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