Uzm, the home unicorn of Central Asian countries, was co-led with China’s Tencent and New York-based VR capital, and joined by US-based Fintai Vanting, and Uzbekistan emerged as a rare middle ground, with Uzbekistan as an unusual middle ground.
All Equity Round will raise the Tashkent Headcover startup’s post-money valuation to around $1.5 billion. This jumped nearly 30% from the $1.16 billion valuation that was announced when it first hit Unicorn Status last March.
Founded in 2022, Uzum began his journey in Uzbekistan on an e-commerce marketplace called the Uzum Market, and shortly after its success, the startup added fintech with debit cards and later expanded to Uzum Tezcoll, an express food delivery service.
Uzum currently boasts over 17 million active users. It boasts almost half of Uzbekistan’s adult population, or about two-thirds of all smartphone users in the country and 16,000 merchants. In the first half of 2025 alone, startups increased nearly 1.5 times year-on-year, recording a total product value (GMV) of $250 million.
Its digital banking arm, Uzum Bank, launched a co-branded visa debit card in August last year with pre-approved credit restrictions. The product has already issued 2 million cards and is on track to surpass 5 million at the end of the year. Meanwhile, Uzum’s unsecured lending business reached $200 million in the first quarter, up 3.4 times from the same period last year. The startup recorded a net profit of $150 million in 2024. This is a 50% jump from the previous year.
How has the portfolio spanning e-commerce, fintech and digital banking enabled startups to rapidly increase the speed of those over 3 years old?
Uzum founder and CEO Djasur Djumaev attributes success to a combination of in-depth local knowledge and disciplined execution. He believes that understanding the country’s culture, consumer behavior, and business environment, combining it with the technical and operational expertise developed by global companies is important to building a rapid, sustainable and expandable business.
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The startup has built digital and physical infrastructure from the ground up to start a business in Uzbekistan. This includes setting logistics capacity that has grown to over 112,000 square meters, allowing you to process over 200,000 orders per day.
The startup has also set more than 1,500 pickup points in 450 cities, towns, settlements and villages across the country to allow for next-day delivery. These pickup points also allow you to issue and distribute Uzum Bank cards.
“Betting on local expertise and infrastructure in the frontier market has the advantage of playing and expanding your business very quickly,” Djumaev told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview.
Initially, uzum operated on a rich operator model to enable e-commerce delivery. Since then, we have expanded to include per-seller delivery and per-delivery options with the aim of routing 20-30% of delivery through these new models. These new delivery models will also help Uzum expand its stockholding units. This is currently available over 1.5 million over the next day delivery service from over 600,000 SKUs at the time of the last funding announcement in March 2024.
This time, when asked what brought Tencent to the cap table, Uzum’s chief strategy and business development director Nikolay Sereznev told TechCrunch that the startup’s strong growth metrics persuaded Chinese investors to take part after ongoing debate over the next few quarters.
Uzum plans to grow its fintech business by introducing deposit products in September and introducing a long-term (more than 12 months) credit facility for B2C customers. The startup is also planning to expand its merchant base, support existing new merchants with QR code payment processing systems, expand its Visa debit card program and build new products that support small and medium-sized businesses in the country.
Similarly, startups will introduce new products that add value-added services to their e-commerce businesses, including those that help generate advertising revenue. We are also working to expand our financial infrastructure further as AI is increasingly embedded in credit scoring, fraud protection and personalized user experiences.
Additionally, Uzum is set to open an e-commerce market for international merchants starting with those in China and Türkiye in September.
“We expect 10-15% of the cross-border activities coming from these countries,” Seleznev said.
The startup has over 12,000 employees, including pickup points blue-collar workers, all business vertical high-tech, engineering and product teams.
Like other companies of this type that are profitable and have multiple paths to generate continuous revenue over time, Uzum has plans to publish in the medium term. But prior to that, they aim to raise a Series B round of between $250 million and $300 million in the first half of 2026.
That said, the startup has so far raised $137 million in shares, including its latest round.
