HackAlem AI brought together around 2,500 participants from 21 countries in Astana. Its technology partners included OpenAI and NVIDIA. The event also set a Guinness World Records title for the largest AI hackathon by number of participants. These details were reported in a KRU publication and an announcement by Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development.
After assessing 1,066 AI solutions, the organisers selected 60 projects for the final. Winners and runners-up across 12 tracks were announced at Demo Day on October 16. MoneyGraph Investigator was among the prize-winning projects in the Finance track.
The project addresses a practical question: how can an analyst make sense of thousands of transfers and decide where to begin an investigation? Using the competition dataset, MoneyGraph processed 4,840 transactions connecting 2,248 network nodes. The system shows where money flows converge, which participants they pass through and which nodes warrant priority attention.
A defining feature is the explainability of its findings. Analysts can see the evidence behind each hypothesis, alternative explanations and the limitations of the source data. An AI assistant allows users to ask questions in everyday language and receive explanations based on calculated metrics. The final decision remains with the specialist.
The project implements all five mandatory requirements and eight optional features of the competition brief. Additional capabilities include checks on the robustness of findings and mechanisms to identify data gaps that need to be addressed for further analysis. All these features work with the supplied anonymised data export, without enrichment from external sources.
The second-place award includes a US$3,000 cash prize from Astana Hub and a further US$3,000 in OpenAI tokens. HackAlem AI’s total prize pool amounted to US$220,000, including cash awards and technology resources.
Congratulations to Andrey Unru on this international achievement! We wish him every success in developing MoneyGraph Investigator further. We are proud of you!
