If you follow Kusto Group closely, you know the broad strokes. The cargo airline, the record grain exports, the Tambour IPO in the works, the pet food factory, the logistics complex worth 28 billion tenge taking shape outside Almaty. It’s a lot to keep track of, and the business press does a reasonable job of covering it.
What tends to get lost in all of that is something quieter. Something that doesn’t come with a press release or a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Something that Yerkin Tatishev has been building in parallel with Kusto Group’s commercial expansion for nearly two decades, and that might matter more in the long run than any single infrastructure project.
He’s been investing in people. Seriously, consistently, and without much fanfare. And if you want to understand why Kusto Group operates the way it does, this is the part of the story you need.
A School Built on a Hunch That Turned Out to Be Right
In 2017, Yerkin Tatishev opened High Tech Academy, the first school of its kind in Kazakhstan, built around the idea that innovation is something you can teach, and that teaching it early is worth the effort.
At the time, it was a bit of a contrarian bet. Kazakhstan had real economic ambitions and growing industries, but its education system was largely designed for a different kind of economy, one built on resources that come out of the ground rather than ideas that come out of people’s heads. Tatishev saw that gap and decided to do something about it rather than wait for someone else to.
What’s notable isn’t just that he built the school. It’s that it fits the same pattern visible across everything Kusto Group has ever done. Find the structural gap. Build something solid to fill it. Don’t cut corners, because cutting corners is how you end up rebuilding the same thing five years later. High Tech Academy is that logic applied to people instead of pipelines. And people, it turns out, compound even better than grain terminals.
The University Chapter
In May 2023, Yerkin Tatishev took on the chairmanship of the Board of Trustees at Almaty Management University, known as AlmaU, one of Kazakhstan’s more serious institutions for business and leadership education.
It would be easy to read this as a prestige appointment. A successful businessman lending his name to a university board, showing up for a few meetings a year, going home. That’s not what’s happened.
Under his involvement, AlmaU has deepened its connections with industry in ways that Kazakhstani business education has historically struggled to achieve. By 2026, those connections have grown into something real. Students are working through problems from actual companies, and institutions are preparing people for global markets rather than local exam boards. Kusto Group’s own operations, spanning agriculture, construction materials, logistics, and real estate across more than twelve countries, provide exactly the kind of real-world complexity that makes that kind of training meaningful.
Tatishev has framed this simply: if Kazakhstan wants to compete internationally, it needs people who are actually equipped to do that. Not people who have studied the theory of global business from a textbook, but people who have been trained alongside the industries they’ll eventually run. It sounds obvious when you say it out loud. It’s surprisingly rare in practice.
The Foundation He Doesn’t Talk About Much
There’s something that almost never comes up in coverage of Yerkin Tatishev or Kusto Group, and it’s probably the most personal thing he does.
Since 2007, the Yerzhan Tatishev Foundation, named after his brother who was murdered in 2004, has provided educational grants and scholarships to 264 children. Not 264 high-potential students from well-connected families. Just children who needed the help and wouldn’t have gotten the opportunity otherwise. That’s nearly twenty years of consistent giving, quietly, without it becoming part of his public profile or Kusto Group’s marketing materials.
He’s also a trustee of the Miloserdie Foundation and one of the founders of the Kantar Legal Support Center, two more institutions that exist entirely outside the commercial portfolio and that he supports because he thinks they matter, not because they generate any visible return.
It doesn’t fit the archetype of the billionaire philanthropist who announces a large gift and names a building after himself. It fits something more like a person who understood early that access to education is not equally distributed, and decided over many years, through a structure named after someone he lost, to quietly do something about it.
Why This Actually Matters for Kusto Group
Here’s where the education story and the business story converge.
Kusto Group’s portfolio has expanded dramatically over the past decade. Agriculture in Kazakhstan and Ukraine, construction materials in Israel, real estate in Almaty and Georgia, logistics across Central Asia. These are not simple businesses to run. They require people who understand data analytics and precision farming, international supply chains, institutional governance, and how to manage operations across multiple countries and regulatory environments at the same time.
Those people don’t appear from nowhere. They come from schools and universities that took their development seriously, that gave them real frameworks for thinking, real problems worth solving, and real exposure to the industries they’d eventually work in.
Yerkin Tatishev’s investment in education isn’t a side project running parallel to Kusto Group. It’s part of the same thesis: that the quality of the environment in which a business operates determines how far that business can actually go. You can build a world-class grain export operation, but if the country around it can’t produce people capable of running it at the next level of sophistication, you’ve hit a ceiling. Tatishev has been working on that ceiling for a long time. Kusto Group benefits from it. So does Kazakhstan.
The Return You Can’t Put in a Report
Scholarships awarded in 2007 are producing professionals right now. A school opened in 2017 will send its most consequential graduates into the workforce in the next few years. University partnerships built under Kusto Group’s influence in 2026 will shape Kazakhstani business leadership for the decade that follows.
None of this shows up in a quarterly report. All of it is real.
That’s the most honest summary of how Yerkin Tatishev and Kusto Group operate, not just in education, but across everything they do. The things that matter most take the longest to see. And the people who build them tend not to need you to notice while they’re doing it.
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