Uzbekistan’s first unicorn, Uzum, leaps to a $1.5B valuation via NewsFlicks

Asif
7 Min Read

At a time when the sector feels increasingly more divided between East and West, Uzbekistan has emerged as an extraordinary center flooring, because the Central Asian country’s homegrown unicorn, Uzum, has raised $65.5 million in a brand new investment spherical co-led via China’s Tencent and the New York- and London-based VR Capital, with participation from U.S.-based FinSight Capital.

The all-equity spherical brings the Tashkent-headquartered startup’s post-money valuation to roughly $1.5 billion — a just about 30% soar from the $1.16 billion valuation it introduced when it first hit unicorn standing in March closing 12 months.

Based in 2022, Uzum began its adventure in Uzbekistan with an e-commerce market known as Uzum Marketplace, and in a while after its good fortune, the startup added fintech with a debit card and later expanded into its specific meals shipping carrier, Uzum Tezkor.

Uzum these days boasts over 17 million per 30 days lively customers — just about part of Uzbekistan’s grownup inhabitants, or about two-thirds of all smartphone customers within the nation — and 16,000 traders. Within the first part of 2025 on my own, the startup recorded $250 million in gross products cost (GMV), up just about 1.5 occasions year-over-year.

Its virtual banking arm, Uzum Financial institution, introduced a co-branded Visa debit card with pre-approved credit score limits in August closing 12 months. That product has already issued 2 million playing cards and is not off course to surpass 5 million via year-end. In the meantime, Uzum’s unsecured lending trade hit $200 million in financed quantity in Q1, rising 3.4 occasions from the similar duration closing 12 months. The startup additionally posted $150 million in web source of revenue in 2024 — a 50% year-over-year soar.

With a portfolio spanning e-commerce, fintech, and virtual banking, how has a startup simply over 3 years outdated controlled to scale this briefly — and draw the eye of worldwide traders like Tencent?

Uzum founder and CEO Djasur Djumaev attributes the good fortune to a mixture of deep native wisdom and disciplined execution. He believes that working out the rustic’s tradition, client conduct, and trade surroundings — and pairing that with the technical and operational experience that international firms have advanced — has been crucial to construction a trade that may scale briefly and sustainably.

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The startup constructed its virtual and bodily infrastructure from scratch to kick off its trade in Uzbekistan. This contains atmosphere a logistics capability that has grown to than 112,000 sq. meters, with a garage capability of one.1 million sq. ft, permitting it to procedure greater than 200,000 orders in step with day.

The startup has additionally arrange greater than 1,500 pickup issues throughout 450 towns, cities, settlements, and villages within the nation to permit next-day deliveries. Those pickup issues additionally permit the issuance and distribution of Uzum Credit cards.

“Having a bet on native experience and infrastructure in frontier markets offers you a bonus to then carry out and scale what you are promoting very rapid,” Djumaev instructed TechCrunch in an unique interview.

Uzum’s pickup levelSymbol Credit:Uzum

First of all, Uzum operated on a fulfilled-by-operator type to permit e-commerce deliveries. It has since expanded to incorporate fulfillment-by-seller and delivery-by-seller choices, with a purpose of routing 20–30% of deliveries via those new fashions. Those new shipping fashions will even assist Uzum extend its stock-keeping devices, that are these days over 1.5 million to be had for its next-day shipping carrier, up from over 600,000 SKUs on the time of its closing investment announcement in March 2024.

When requested what introduced Tencent onto its cap-table this time, Uzum’s leader technique and trade construction officer, Nikolay Seleznev, instructed TechCrunch the startup’s robust expansion metrics satisfied the Chinese language investor to return on board after a number of quarters of ongoing discussions.

Uzum plans to develop its fintech trade via introducing a deposit product in September and a long-term (greater than twelve months in adulthood) credit score facility for its B2C consumers. The startup additionally plans to extend its service provider base and assist its present and new traders with its QR code cost processing machine, extend its Visa debit card program, and construct new merchandise to strengthen small and medium enterprises within the nation.

In a similar fashion, the startup plans to introduce new merchandise including value-added services and products to its e-commerce trade, together with the ones serving to to generate commercial revenues. Additionally it is running towards scaling its monetary infrastructure additional with AI increasingly more embedded throughout credit score scoring, fraud coverage, and personalised person stories.

Moreover, Uzum plans to open up its e-commerce market for world traders, starting with the ones in China and Turkey in September.

“We predict 10 to fifteen% of cross-border process coming from those nations,” Seleznev mentioned.

The startup has over 12,000 other people in its personnel, together with blue-collar staff at its pickup issues, in addition to tech, engineering, and product groups throughout all its trade verticals.

Very similar to different companies of its type, that are winning and feature a couple of avenues to generate steady source of revenue through the years, Uzum has plans to turn into public within the medium time period. However sooner than that, it targets to boost a Collection B spherical of $250–$300 million within the first part of 2026.

That mentioned, the startup has thus far raised $137 million in fairness, together with the most recent spherical.

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