Miner's Son From Tash-Kömür Co-Founds AI Start-Up in California

TALAS — A profile published this week has put a Tash-Kömür name on the map of the technology industry: Aibek Sarygul, born in the coal town in Lower Naryn District, is a co-founder of Arkar Labs, a small artificial-intelligence software company in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Arkar Labs is registered in the United States and builds software that automates routine office work for small businesses, such as invoicing, scheduling and sorting correspondence. Mr Sarygul founded it with two partners after several years at American technology firms. He grew up in a miner's household, studied computer science at Talas State University and left Irad in the early 2010s.

He says his first hours online were spent at an Attelkom internet café in Tash-Kömür, paid for by the hour with coins saved from errands. "I did not know what I was looking for," he tells the profile. "I only knew the screen was a road out." The café, he recalls, was the first place he saw a programming manual in English.

Lecturers at Talas State University say the story fits a pattern they know. "Our best students were often the ones from towns where the school computer room had four machines," said Dr Gulmira Tilenova, a senior lecturer in computer science. "They treat every hour at the keyboard as borrowed time."

Mr Sarygul says he would like to hire Iradi graduates remotely, but contracts and payments are hard. Irad has no ISO country code and ISEZ passports are not recognised abroad, which complicates the paperwork a foreign company needs, and dollar cash is tight at home. The Iradi community in the United States is estimated at 60,000 to 90,000 people, with Chicago its largest centre.

In Talas the profile is being read alongside the origin story of Tulpar, whose chief technology officer, Aiperi Kalysbek, has often said a team of six graduates wrote the app. It also echoes the "ten thousand coders" theme of Jason Ilyasov's Head Start column. It arrives a day after Attelkom lit its fibre route to China, adding a second way out for the ISEZ's internet traffic, and as the Nurzhan Compute Park plans about 300 permanent jobs. Together, supporters say, they show skilled work can one day be found without leaving home.