Uzum, Uzbekistan’s first tech unicorn, had a good year in 2024 with net income up by half year on year to $150mn, company head of strategy Nikolai Seleznev told bne IntelliNews.

“It as a good result as we continued to expand the top line that was reflected in the bottom line,” said Seleznev speaking from the company’s headquarters in Tashkent. “This year, we are cautiously guiding for another 30-40% of growth to $200mn net income, if you are being conservative, but I am expecting more than that, driven by our fast growing fintech business.”

Set up in 2022, the company has grown by leaps and bounds as e-commerce comes of age in Central Asia’s most populous market.

“We have 16mn users on all platforms now. That is about half the population of the whole country and two thirds of all smartphone users,” Seleznev says.

Uzbekistan has gone through a rapid transformation since Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev took over in 2016 and launched a wide-ranging economics liberalisation and reform programme. Since then growth has averages around 6% a year and incomes have risen sharply, creating and emerging middle class.

One of the new products the company introduced in 2024 was DBS, delivery by seller, as a new model where product producers can use Uzum’s distribution to get their goods to customers as part of the company’s market place platform offering. “We are active in 18 cities of Uzbekistan and have the widest coverage in the country,” say Seleznev.

Uzum has managed to tap into this flourishing consumerism by establishing its own logistics and distribution system that reaches all the major towns and cities in the country and the widespread use of smartphones by a population, 60% of which is in its 20s or below.

Fintech

In the last quarter of last year Uzum’s offering has increasingly become intertwined with banking and payments services. The fintech part of the business ballooned when the company offered a debit card with a pre-approved credit limit and 700,000 people took up the offer despite the fact the company had done no marketing ahead of the launch at all.

“The credit limit is means tested by the usual means. Users apply online and have to give basic information that allows you score them and set the credit limit,” said Seleznev, who added that the average credit is $50 in soum equivalent, but can go up to $2,500.

The launch of the debit cards has turbo-boosted Uzum’s fintech offering and expanded its loan portfolio. In the current year the company intends to roll out new services targeting B2C and B2B customers, which are currently underserved by the banking sector but represent a large part of the Uzbek economy.

One of Uzum’s competitive advantages in fintech is it has created its own clearance system, rather than rely on the central bank’s system. This allows the company to introduce new products that are hard for its rivals to copy. For example, Uzum is widely used by customers to transfer money between themselves, because as long as the transfers are in-system they are free of charge. Other banks have to charge for transfers as they have to pay fees to the UzCard central settlement system. “Thanks to the free transfers our service has become the main way that people share money between themselves,” says Seleznev.

Uzum’s fintech user base is already up to 1mn people versus the total active banking users of around 15mn.

“Things are changing fast. The young population are hungry for modern products and keen to learn about new technologies. There are 5mn debit cards in circulation, an active banking population of about 15mn and the cash economy is about 20mn people. Our core audience is all the smartphone users,” say Seleznev. “And so far we have relied largely on word-of-mouth to market our fintech services.”

Series B fund raising

As reported by bne IntelliNews, Uzum plans to raise a series B funding to continue investing into the company’s fast growth. However, given the much better than expected growth in 2024, Seleznev says the plans have been altered somewhat.

“We still plan to go to investors, but we want to take a little more time to build on what we have achieved already. You need money to make money and we will ask for a little more. We were looking at raising $150mn but now I think it will be more like $200mn in the second half of 2025,” say Seleznev. “It will be the last round of funding before the IPO.”

Uzum has already started conversations with some sovereign wealth funds from the GCC countries as well as US tier one growth equity funds who are interested in the story and can help with a listing on Nasdaq when Uzum is ready for that.

Seleznev in the meantime and his colleagues are simply trying to get the word out about Uzbekistan’s flourishing tech sector. He travelled to the recent TechCrunch annual meeting in the US to meet investors and partners.

“Talking to people changes everything. It’s so much better than sending emails or doing Zoom calls,” says Seleznev. “There are a number of funds now that are actively following our story.”