Ainura Sagyn

2017 fellow of Kyrgyzstan Ainura Sagyn was recently awarded the Toptal Scholarship for Women, a $10,000 prize to accelerate the careers and initiatives of female CEOs and founders. Ainura’s startup, WasteToWealth, aims to reduce litter and encourage re-use through an online platform where Bishkek citizens can sell recyclable waste. Alongside a Toptal mentor and machine learning expert, Ainura hopes to create an online feature that will help recognize specific plastics for more efficient recycling.
Ainura will use a portion of her Toptal funding to buy laptops for Technovation Coding Caravan, her project that will visit villages in rural Kyrgyzstan to put on four-day coding seminars for girls. She will also use the money to enroll in programming and machine learning courses from Udacity’s School of AI. With any remaining funding, Ainura hopes to travel to the 2019 Grace Hopper Celebration, which she has dreamed about attending for many years.