Aruzhan Mede named in Forbes Kazakhstan's 30 Under 30
Our founder has been recognised in the technology category of the ninth annual Forbes Kazakhstan ranking. The work it points at is the part worth talking about.
Aruzhan Mede, founder of AMAN, has been named in the technology category of Forbes Kazakhstan's ninth annual «30 до 30» ranking — the magazine's list of thirty people under thirty who are changing their fields.
We are glad about it. But a founder's name on a list is not the interesting part. What the recognition points at is.
What it is actually recognising
AMAN began with an SOS button.
The idea came after a series of high-profile violence cases in Kazakhstan — the kind that make the news for a week, prompt a round of statements, and then leave the people closest to the problem with nothing new to work with. The first product, launched in 2024, did one thing: it connected a person in danger to licensed security services and to the people they trust, immediately, from their phone.
It is free for residents of Kazakhstan. That was a deliberate decision rather than a growth tactic — a safety tool that only some people can afford solves a smaller problem than the one we set out to solve.
Since then it has been integrated with the Ministry of Internal Affairs and is in use across every region of the country.
Why a button turned into three layers
The SOS button works when someone can reach for it.
That turned out to be the limit worth designing around. A student being bullied over months does not press a button. Neither does a child who has stopped talking about it, or one who has learnt that reporting makes things worse. By the time somebody reaches for help, the situation has usually been developing for a long time — and the record of that development, the part that would have made intervention possible, does not exist anywhere.
So AMAN became three connected layers rather than one app:
- Safeguarding intelligence, which detects incidents on cameras a school already owns
- SOS and IoT, the original button, now with parental oversight
- Mental health, opt-in check-ins on validated psychological scales
Each covers what the others cannot. Cameras see what nobody reports. The button covers what cameras cannot see. Check-ins surface what nobody has said out loud yet.
What the recognition does not mean
It does not mean the problem is solved, and it is worth being precise about that, because safeguarding is a field with a long history of confident claims.
AMAN detects patterns and escalates them to people. It does not make judgements about children. The mental health layer is opt-in and self-reported by design — no emotion recognition, no profiling, no scoring of students. That is a constraint we chose before the EU AI Act made a version of it law, and the reason the compliance pages on this site are as specific as they are.
What the ranking recognises, we think, is that this is a category where the technology has usually arrived faster than the thinking about it, and where getting the second part right is what determines whether the first part is any use.
What is next
AMAN is now working with schools in the UAE, and preparing to enter European markets.
The regulatory ground differs everywhere — KCSIE and Ofsted in the UK, the EU AI Act and LOPIVI in Europe, «Дети Казахстана» at home — but the underlying request from every safeguarding lead we have met is the same. They want to know sooner, and they want to be able to show what they did about it.
That is the work. The list is a good day; the work is the point.
Forbes Kazakhstan's «30 до 30» is an annual ranking of thirty people under thirty across business, technology, science, culture and sport. The full list is published at forbes.kz.