Azizjon Azimi’s Post

Thanks to its tech community effort, #Tajikistan emerges as the region’s unlikely #AI champion.  According to RISE Research, in 2024 Tajikistan has doubled its share of venture investment funding from 2% to about 5% with a total of USD 4.6 million. Unlike Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the region’s smallest economy lacks massive institutional support for startups from the government. Yet, it has produced some of the region’s most successful AI entrepreneurs, such as Azizjon Azimi, a Stanford graduate and a founder of zypl.ai, which earlier this year has attracted USD 3M from Prosus Ventures. Another company with Tajik origins - fintech platform #Alif, a Shariah-compliant BNPL provider - has already expanded in Central Asia and with the influx of the US private capital now looks beyond the neighborhood. Tajikistan was the first country in the region to develop a national AI strategy back in 2021, and in 2025 it has pioneered the community effort at shaping the region’s AI regulation, calling for self-regulation and horizontal ties to make Central Asia a global ‘AI Sandbox’. The same principles of openness, collaboration, and innovation are reiterated by the Resolution on Artificial Intelligence proposed by Tajikistan to the UN earlier this month. In addition, following the meeting with #NVIDIA, the Artificial Intelligence Council of Tajikistan announced the country’s first #GPU cluster in the newly created AI Area technopark.  Photo by Nicole Ashley Rahayu Densmoor