LocationsThe Ecosystem Behind the Ecosystem: Lessons from Supporting Uzbekistan's Young Innovators
August 6, 2026
Uzbekistan's startup scene looks different today than it did five years ago. The country's tech ecosystem is now valued at close to $4 billion. Startups raised $329 million in 2025 alone - more than four times what they raised the year before. Uzbekistan climbed 19 places in a global startup ranking in a single year, the biggest jump anywhere in the world.
Numbers like these invite a simple explanation: better laws, more funding, stronger institutions. And all of that has mattered. But growth like this rarely starts at the top. It starts with people, a generation willing to try building something, and a place for them to learn how.
The starting point
Back in 2022, most of the ingredients for a thriving startup economy were missing. Studies at the time found that the vast majority of Uzbek startups were still at the earliest, idea stage, barely a fraction had grown into something investable. Government institutions were themselves in flux: ministries were merging, staff were changing, and new digital economy priorities were competing for attention with everything else on the agenda.
In that environment, writing a new law or setting up a national fund would have been premature. There was no track record yet to build policy around, and no visible pool of founders to justify major institutional investment. The real gap wasn't money or regulation it was a pipeline: a way to find people with promising ideas, teach them the basics, and connect them to the people who could help those ideas grow.
Starting small
So that's where UNDP’s work began. Between 2022 and 2026, UNDP and government partners ran a series of hackathons across the country bringing together hundreds of young people, almost half of them women, to build and pitch their first digital products. A dedicated women's edition (2023-2026) made sure the pipeline wasn't accidentally excluding half the country's talent from the outset. Alongside the hackathons, a digital internship (2024-2025) and AI training program (2026) gave young women their first real exposure to tech workplaces several went on to become mentors and industry voices in their own right. In Chorshanbe and Khazarasp, small IT and business training centers opened their doors to local youth who had never had access to this kind of training before.
None of this looked like "ecosystem building" yet. It looked like a handful of workshops and a training center. But it was creating something that hadn't existed before: a visible, trackable group of young entrepreneurs with real ideas, and it taught UNDP an early lesson that shaped everything after: support must meet people where they are before it can ask institutions to change around them.
Once the pipeline existed, everything else followed
By 2024 and 2025, the picture changed. A private angel investor network grew from 6 members to more than 40 members investing $220,000 because there was now a genuinely investable dealflow to back. PizzaPitch, a platform event UNDP developed with partners, became a regular launchpad connecting founders with mentors and early customers. Women-focused programs expanded, including a study visit to WEB Summit in Lisbon and South Summit in Madrid for a new cohort of women founders. And independently, Uzbekistan's own venture capital infrastructure matured alongside this work, new funds like IT Park Ventures and AloqaVentures began investing real money in real companies, entirely on their own market terms.
That combination is where the proof shows up. Mumin Salimov pitched his HR software startup, Verifix, at a UNDP PizzaPitch event in 2024. He went on to win a national startup competition against more than 120 competitors, and in 2025 raised $400,000 from IT Park Ventures and AloqaVentures - investors with no obligation to fund him, who did so because the product worked. Verifix now serves over 200 companies, and Salimov represents Uzbekistan at a global startup competition in Silicon Valley. From the same cohort, Islomjon Oripov's home healthcare platform, Onlayn Hamshira, won a President's Tech Award and has completed more than 7,000 patient visits. In 2026 among the women who came through Madrid and related programs, founders like Kamola Ubaeva and Aida Azamatkyzy went on to raise their own early investment - proof that designing opportunities specifically for women, rather than hoping they'd show up on their own, actually worked. Behind these standout names are dozens more graduates of programmes supported by UNDP with financial support from Russian Federation (in health tech, education, and retail) who are still building their businesses, who have working products and real users, even if they haven't made headlines yet.
What this means for what comes next
Today, that early pipeline work is feeding directly into Uzbekistan's first draft Law on Startups, with UNDP providing technical input alongside government drafters, and universities are beginning to run their own hackathons without external support. That's the real marker of success not that a donor-funded programme produced good stories, but that government institutions, private sector and universities are now carrying the work forward themselves.
For governments building their own digital economy strategies, the lesson is a simple one: don't start with the law or the fund. Start by finding the right people and build outward from there. Design inclusion in from day one - don't add it later. And when the evidence starts to show what works, that's the moment to write it into policy.
