NPAI
A marketplace of ready-made industrial IoT modules
Problem
A temperature sensor in a furniture plant and the same sensor in a food plant are one task solved twice by two contractors for twice the money. And so it goes across the country.
Solution
A shelf of vetted modules: sensor drivers, AI models and dashboards that install in an evening. Like an app store, but for manufacturing. The data stays at the plant: the module is installed on its own infrastructure.
Engineering decisions
- The free Eco module with public air-quality data is open without registration: useful to the city and an honest shop window at the same time — you can see how the platform behaves.
- Code preview before purchase comes with limits: a legal agreement, watermarks in the samples, usage tracking. Without that no developer brings their module to the platform.
- Two dashboards: the full one for the shop floor and a lighter one for a manager's phone.
What went wrong
- The demo is a front end on demo data: purchases are simulated and there is no code behind the buy button. A catalogue of "50+ solutions" is a catalogue front, not fifty finished, vetted modules.
- The market figures are estimates from public industry reports, not our revenue. The project has no revenue; sales were never started.
- Modular IoT hardware is an idea, not a product: we never laid out a single board.
Result
We passed the online selection and made the thirty teams that pitched in person. We didn't go further. Making the top thirty on a first outing at a venue that size is a fair result, but we won't overrate it: the first paying customer is still a long way off.
What I'd do differently
Half of what we now say about the market and the model came out of conversations at venues, not out of writing code. The next step isn't another feature on the front — it's a backend, payments and one real deployment: one of those outweighs every presentation put together.
How it went
The project has been touring venues since 2024: idea battles and pitch sessions at Qostanai Hub, a pitch venue in Petropavlovsk, and Startup Battle at IT Fest 2025 in Almaty. Nobody there cares about code — they ask about the market, about who pays and why you, about the competitors you failed to name. Half of what is written above about the market and the model came out of exactly those conversations.
Certificates
Third place with NPAI. Pizza Pitch is Astana Hub's open pitching format: a short defence of an idea in front of the room and invited investors. Signed by Damir Mnaidarov, director of the Kostanay branch of the Technopark of Innovation Technologies cluster fund — Astana Hub's legal entity; the form carries the Qostanai Hub and AMANAT logos, with the team name written in by hand. The diploma is dated by year only.
