At a time when the world feels increasingly divided between East and West, Uzbekistan has emerged as a rare middle ground. The Central Asian nation’s homegrown unicorn, Uzum, has raised $65.5 million in a new funding round co-led by China’s Tencent and the New York- and London-based VR Capital, with participation from U.S.-based FinSight Capital.
The all-equity round brings the Tashkent-headquartered startup’s post-money valuation to approximately $1.5 billion—a nearly 30% jump from the $1.16 billion valuation it announced when it first achieved unicorn status in March last year.
Founded in 2022, Uzum began its journey with an e-commerce marketplace called Uzum Market. Following its success, the startup expanded into fintech with a debit card and later launched an express food delivery service, Uzum Tezkor.
Today, Uzum boasts over 17 million monthly active users—nearly half of Uzbekistan’s adult population and about two-thirds of all smartphone users in the country. The platform also serves 16,000 merchants. In the first half of 2025 alone, the startup recorded $250 million in gross merchandise value, a 1.5-fold increase year-over-year.
Its digital banking arm, Uzum Bank, launched a co-branded Visa debit card with pre-approved credit limits in August last year. The product has already issued 2 million cards and is on track to surpass 5 million by year-end. Meanwhile, Uzum’s unsecured lending business reached $200 million in financed volume in the first quarter, growing 3.4 times from the same period last year. The startup also posted $150 million in net income in 2024, a 50% year-over-year increase.
With a portfolio spanning e-commerce, fintech, and digital banking, how has a startup just over three years old managed to scale so quickly—and attract global investors like Tencent?
Uzum founder and CEO Djasur Djumaev attributes the success to a combination of deep local knowledge and disciplined execution. He believes that understanding Uzbekistan’s culture, consumer behavior, and business environment—paired with the technical and operational expertise of global companies—has been critical to building a scalable and sustainable business.
The startup built its digital and physical infrastructure from scratch, including logistics capacity that has grown to over 112,000 square meters, with a storage capacity of 1.1 million square feet. This allows Uzum to process more than 200,000 orders per day. The company has also established over 1,500 pickup points across 450 cities, towns, settlements, and villages, enabling next-day deliveries and the distribution of Uzum Bank cards.
“Betting on local expertise and infrastructure in frontier markets gives you an advantage to scale your business very fast,” Djumaev explained.
Initially, Uzum operated on a fulfilled-by-operator model for e-commerce deliveries. It has since expanded to include fulfillment-by-seller and delivery-by-seller options, aiming to route 20–30% of deliveries through these new models. These changes will also help Uzum expand its stock-keeping units, which currently exceed 1.5 million for next-day delivery—up from over 600,000 SKUs at the time of its last funding announcement in March 2024.
When asked what attracted Tencent as an investor, Uzum’s chief strategy and business development officer, Nikolay Seleznev, cited the startup’s strong growth metrics, which convinced the Chinese investor after several quarters of discussions.
Looking ahead, Uzum plans to grow its fintech business by introducing a deposit product in September and a long-term credit facility for its B2C customers. The startup also aims to expand its merchant base, enhance its QR code payment processing system, and develop new products to support small and medium enterprises in Uzbekistan.
On the e-commerce front, Uzum will introduce value-added services, including advertising revenue streams. The company is also integrating AI across credit scoring, fraud protection, and personalized user experiences to scale its financial infrastructure further.
Additionally, Uzum plans to open its e-commerce marketplace to international merchants, starting with those in China and Turkey in September. “We expect 10 to 15% of cross-border activity to come from these countries,” Seleznev said.
The startup employs over 12,000 people, including blue-collar workers at pickup points, as well as tech, engineering, and product teams across all business verticals.
Like other profitable businesses with multiple revenue streams, Uzum aims to go public in the medium term. Before that, it plans to raise a Series B round of $250–$300 million in the first half of 2026. To date, the startup has raised $137 million in equity, including the latest round.