Uzbekistan’s tech sector has come of age. Uzum is Uzbekistan’s leading tech giant and has doubled in size since its launch in 2022, and expects to double again in 2025. It has already raised more than $100mn this year, giving it a valuation of over $1bn that makes it the country’s first ever unicorn, and now is preparing for a second, series B funding round next spring to fund further fast growth before it attempts an eventual IPO.

Nikolay Seleznev, Uzum's chief strategy and business development officer, has been with the firm from its inception. He cut his teeth working for global investment banks and industrial companies in the boom years of the noughties, but is now laying out the company’s strategy and fundraising.

The founder, Djasur Djumaev, had already set up a number of profitable online and telecom businesses in CIS, Africa and Latin America and decided to come back to Uzbekistan to build a new business.

“We started from scratch. I remember sitting round a table with a whiteboard and planning out the whole venture in January of 2022. Two years on and we have created most of the things on that board,” says Seleznev.

Uzum operates in two major areas: e-commerce and fintech. The company operates Uzum Market, a next-day delivery e-commerce business that is already the national champion; and a fintech business that has grown rapidly, focusing on daily banking through a neobank and instalment credit business as well as on services to cater for the booming SME segment.

“We started several businesses at once. We either acquired existing business to transform it into a vital part of the ecosystem or built them up ourselves,” says Seleznev in a zoom interview with bne IntelliNews from his office in Tashkent.

Uzbekistan is an entrepreneurial country with over 800,000 SMEs active in a population of 37mn, the most populous country in Central Asia. But Seleznev says that SMEs were badly underserved by existing banks.

Late in 2021, half of all Uzbeks had no banking account at all, and of the other half that did, only 3% had any money on their account. Fast forward to the end of 2023 and more debit cards have been issued than there are people in the country.

“People are changing their habits at a breakneck speed,” says Seleznev.

Changing – yes, but some old habits die hard.

Seleznev explains that queues still form at the banks as customers queue up for the “spravka”, the small pieces of paper that prove they have paid in money for their loans. All these receipts are available online, but a lifetime habit and the security of a physical piece of paper are hard to give up overnight for many people.

After Uzum successfully launched its e-commerce platform in 2022 and scaled it in 2023 to become a household name for shopping, in August 2024 Uzum FinTech invested almost nothing into marketing, relying on word-of-mouth recommendations to promote its products and to bring in new customers. That was enough for the bank to issue more than 600,000 debit cards that come with a credit limit linked to them.

“These cards are essentially quasi-credit cards and very popular,” Seleznev says.

Uzum was looking around for models. In Kazakhstan, it was Kaspi.kz that put Central Asia’s internet ventures on the map with a $6.5bn IPO in 2020. But the conditions in the oil-rich, and in many ways more developed Kazakhstan are very different from Uzbekistan, which had been cut off from the rest of the world until the death of its former president Islam Karimov in 2016. The new president, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, has since opened the country up to the rest of the world and transformed the economy with rapid and radical liberal economic reforms.

e-commerce & fintech

“We see ourselves as a combination of Amazon Plus, Revolut and other fintech companies,” says Seleznev. “It's a question of copy, pick and mix from all the other models and also create something new on top.”

For example, one of the differences between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan is that the logistics to support home or pick-up point deliveries in Kazakhstan were already well developed, whereas they didn't exist in Uzbekistan.

“That makes e-commerce in Kazakhstan asset-light, as you can just plug into an existing logistics operator. In Uzbekistan it is asset-heavy as we had to build the logistics system, the warehouses, pick-up points – everything – ourselves, pretty much from scratch,” says Seleznev. “We had to solve these problems by investing into the infrastructure. But now it’s a competitive advantage.”

Today Uzum covers the whole country, including all the towns, cities and any settlement of 10,000 people or more, guaranteeing next-day delivery on any order.

Uzbekistan has an open banking system where all the processing is centralized. But that was a problem for Uzum, as when it introduced any innovative product, it was very simple for any competitor to quickly replicate them. So Uzum built its own system.

“We built it all in-house, all the processing and core banking functions and systems. That means if we introduced an innovative product, it couldn't be easily copied without investing the same amount of money,” says Seleznev.

Going local

On the face of it, setting up an online business should be a question of copying other models that have worked elsewhere. In practice, it's a lot more difficult, as local peculiarities must be taken into account. For example, French supermarket giant Auchan, which has a $10bn a year turnover business in Russia, tried to enter the Uzbekistan market in 2015 but gave up after only three years. What Auchan didn't anticipate was that Uzbeks have the habit of going to the bazaar once a month and stocking up on bulk staples like rice. They were put off by the higher prices and smaller package portions of organised retail and Auchan never built up the turnover it was hoping for.

“It's a local economy and [the business] needs to be super local to win customers over and cater to their needs,” says Seleznev.

Uzum’s logistics system was a big advantage here, as people would regularly travel long distances from other cities to Tashkent to visit the bazaar; having next-day delivery all over the country holds a great deal of attraction. Another perk is Uzum’s built-in BNPL service, as it means the cost of the monthly shopping trip can be spread over a number of weeks.

Uzbekistan is a secular state, but in the last decade the local mores have become increasingly religious and Sharia-compliant services are attractive for part of the nation.

Finally, the population is not used to having a wide assortment of goods to choose from. Seleznev says that the bazaars carry some 100,000 SKUs, whereas Uzum, with its extensive warehousing system, carries ten times more SKUs. As a result, its marketplace can not only become a one-stop shop for almost everything, but also achieve the economies of scale to be able to offer competitive prices.

New funding round

The company has grown very fast and has already become the national e-commerce champion. On its e-commerce platform, Uzum posted a turnover of $150mn in its first year of operation and expects to double that amount to well above $300mn by the end of this year. Next year, Uzum hopes to double turnover again.

“We are leapfrogging traditional [organised] retail, going straight from the bazaar to e-commerce pick-up points or home delivery, missing out the supermarket stage altogether,” says Seleznev.

E-commerce already accounts for 2-3% of the retail business, and while organised retail has developed rapidly in recent years, it is unlikely to match the growth and size that has been achieved in other similar markets like Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, where the leading companies can see turnover of hundreds of millions, or even billions, of dollars a year.

Uzum has already been through one round of funding in March, raising $100mn+ to give the company a $1.2bn valuation and earn it the title of Uzbekistan’s first unicorn, and the second unicorn in Central Asia after Kaspi.kz’s IPO, the Kazakh super-app, that was valued at $6.5bn during its IPO and put Central Asian tech on the map.

Investors from the US and GCC countries (Gulf Cooperation Council countries) as well as other foreign investors participated in Uzum’s Series A funding round. Now, on the back of inbound interest received, the company wants to do another Series B funding round in the second quarter of 2025, ahead of its eventual IPO. Uzum is considering various options for its IPO, one of which is a dual listing in the UAE and the US’ Nasdaq when it is ready.

“We are hoping to raise twice as much – up to about $300mn – in the series B round and we expect to start thinking about an IPO,” says Seleznev.

Seleznev adds that valuing Central Asian tech companies is not easy and is more of an art than a science, but points to the impressive performance record the company has already put in. The revenue growth has more than doubled between 2022 and this year, and Uzum expects that it will continue to grow thanks to rising incomes, the emergence of a middle class and the country’s persistent 6% GDP growth every year since Mirziyoyev took over in 2016. Uzbekistan is in its fast catch-up stage that shows no sign of coming to an end any time soon.