TrustExam.ai — a Kazakhstani EdTech startup that helps combat cheating on exams

Yersultan Yermanov, City — Palo Alto, CSO, LinkedIn

How It All Began

Oqylyq.kz/TrustExam.ai is a product that fights for exam integrity through AI monitoring. The project started in 2018 when Eduard Zaoukarnaev and I were building our own LMS for educational institutions. That’s when the project name was created. But in 2020, with the onset of the pandemic, everything changed — universities faced a new problem: how to conduct online exams fairly? The answer was Oqylyq.kz and TrustExam.ai in its new form.

A strategic step was participating in conducting the theoretical driving license exam on behalf of a state institution. Now we serve over 500,000 citizens annually and have already reduced the test pass rate by 25%, which genuinely reflects the fight against corruption in the examination system.

Currently, a pilot project of our system for the Unified National Testing (UNT) is being conducted in collaboration with the National Testing Center.

The startup began with a small team of five people. Thanks to previous startup experience and established connections, we were able to quickly assemble a strong team of trusted professionals.

After the pivot in 2020, demand for the solution was so high that the product became cashflow positive from day one. This allowed us to operate without external investments and develop the project in bootstrap mode.

Clients interested in such solutions were willing to grant access to large-scale pilots, which provided us with valuable feedback and the opportunity to rapidly improve the product. Even after the pandemic ended, we continued steady growth, and in 2023, we decided to make this project our main focus and scale it nationally.

Target Audience

We started with a small team of five people. We already had startup experience and a strong network of contacts, which allowed us to quickly assemble professionals.

After the pivot in 2020, demand was so high that the product became cash-flow positive from day one. This allowed us to develop without external investments, in bootstrap mode.

Clients actively participated in pilots, giving us the opportunity to quickly adapt the product to real-world scenarios. Even after the pandemic, interest in our solution did not decrease — on the contrary, we began scaling and in 2023 focused on national and international projects.

Incubation Programs

We went through several key incubation and acceleration programs, each of which provided us with valuable experience and new opportunities:

Hero Training Draper University — a pre-accelerator in partnership with Astana Hub, a personal growth program for founders and soft-landing into Silicon Valley.

StartX Stanford University — recognized as the best accelerator in the US by MIT, this is a community of Stanford University alumni founders, providing lifelong networking and access to society resources. Here we gained unique insights into scaling into the North American market. The StartX community has 4 decacorns, which significantly raised our level of ambition.

Challenges

The biggest mistake at the beginning was trying to accommodate every client request. With experience, we realized: a mature client expects not just fulfillment of wishes, but working solutions.

Our advice to beginners: don’t be afraid to say “no” and justify why your product is structured the way it is. You are the experts; that’s why the client came to you.

Achievements

1. Achieved annual revenue of $1.4 million in 2024, entirely through bootstrapping. We plan to reach $3 million by the end of 2025.

2. Served 4 million users from 2020 to 2024, with another 2 million already planned for this year alone.

3. Successfully entered the international market, signing our first contracts and partnerships in the UK, Canada, and the US.

4. Selected for the StartX accelerator at Stanford University, Hero Training Draper University, and 500 Global Eurasia as a startup with high growth potential and social impact.

Plans

Currently, we are actively entering the government exam markets of North America, the UK, and Africa. We are already in negotiations with local authorities regarding the digitalization of national exams.

The UK plans a similar modernization of the driving theory exam as in Kazakhstan, and our experience here is particularly relevant. We are doing everything to become the operator of this process.

Our goal is to scale the technology at the level of entire countries, ensuring stability, security, and high quality of the examination process.