I founded iBEC Systems in 2004 and grew it into a company building systems for banks, retailers, developers and cities — starting in Central Asia and expanding far beyond it. Now I'm in the Bay Area studying AI at Northeastern University, learning, meeting people and understanding what comes next.
Bay Area, California
Northeastern University — MS in Artificial Intelligence
iBEC Systems, 2004–present
A machine-learning retail management system running 2,000 stores across five countries, with 500+ merchandisers in the field feeding it data every day. It processes 500,000+ transactions a day, builds their store routes, and turns what they collect into reports in real time.
Five years as a technology partner to the largest bank in the country, building fintech products across its ecosystem: the superapp and the services inside it, Kino.kz, travel and insurance platforms.
Five years as technology partner to the largest developer in Kazakhstan: the platform running building services across 300 residential complexes, with resident response time down from four hours to one; their sales CRM and customer superapp; and the website that moved apartment sales fully online during the pandemic.
Industrial production · AI quality control
The full production cycle of seven plants in one system, from customer orders to dispatch. The AI layer on top flags defects before they reach the customer and catches theft; defect rates are down 20–30%.
Two million votes in three days. Every vote signed with a digital ID and traceable end to end, on a high-load architecture with hot failover between data centres in different parts of the country.
Fare payments across every form of public transport in Almaty, grown into a superapp with balance, transfers and purchases inside it.
I spent twenty-two years building iBEC Systems into a company that no longer needs me in the room — which is the only real test of whether you built something. It runs on its own leadership team today. I'm still the founder, still on the board, still in the strategic decisions; I'm just not in the daily ones. That freed me to do the thing I kept postponing: go deep on AI, properly, as a full-time master's student at Northeastern.
Most of what I know came from the unglamorous parts of those twenty-two years: hiring and losing people, closing enterprise deals, surviving cash gaps, shipping systems that thousands of people depend on every morning.
In 2022 I trained as an executive coach and certified with the Institute of Metacognitive Programming in Toronto. Since then I've worked with founders and leadership teams on how they think under pressure, which turned out to be the same problem I had been living, seen from the other side.
And the AI systems we put into production over the last few years are what pushed me back into a classroom. I wanted to properly understand the thing we were already shipping.
If one of these is the problem you're actually in right now — that's the conversation worth having.
Outside software, I've spent years building communities and events too.
If you're building something complicated, write to me.
And if you know the Bay Area unusually well, I'd value that conversation too.