Chapter 4: Azimi's Tools

In shaping Tajikistan’s future, Azimi had the benefit of three organizations he had co-founded: TajRupt (AI Academy), zypl.ai, and the AI Council. Each organization was originally designed to fulfill its own distinct mission: empowering Tajikistan’s youth through education, scaling AI-driven financial innovation to global markets, and aligning government and business interests in technological advancement. The three organizations had vastly different capabilities: an education not-for-profit, a machine learning financial technology startup, and a public-private governmental council. However, collectively they offered powerful levers and potential synergies that Azimi and his team could leverage to transform Tajikistan.

The Education Non-Profit: TajRupt

Azimi co-founded TajRupt in 2017 alongside a group of former teachers, with a mission to develop critical thinking skills and implement social impact projects tackling major challenges in Tajikistan. By 2022, more than 1,000 students had completed TajRupt’s extracurricular programs, covering economics, gender empowerment, arts, and philosophy, based on Azimi’s experiences at NYU, Harvard, and Stanford. In fact, in TajRupt’s early days, Azimi enlisted his highly-pedigreed classmates from around the world to share their stories, broadening the horizons of TajRupt’s students. 

As student demand grew for more practical applications of their technical knowledge, Azimi secured grant funding to launch the AI Academy. The AI Academy focused on data analytics, mathematics, and programming, taught by Tajik engineers who had earned PhDs abroad. The academy quickly gained popularity, further solidifying its reputation after students and faculty collaborated to develop the technology that would evolve into zypl.ai.

Beyond its academic success, the AI Academy became a crucial talent pipeline, producing dozens of skilled alumni who applied their AI/ML expertise to both local and regional businesses. Within two years of graduation, 50 alumni had secured paid internships, and 20 had landed full-time positions at local companies. Many of these graduates were earning higher salaries in their first job than their highest-earning parent, representing a tangible shift in economic mobility.

TajRupt’s ability to deliver on its mission was proven. However, to contribute to the country’s AI Strategy, it would need to scale exponentially, and its scale was constrained by its reliance on grant funding and its current program model. Therefore, TajRupt began working to embed its curriculum into public high schools and colleges. Though this approach provided government funding and reached many more students, it also contained program execution risks as Tajikistan lacked the supply of skilled teaching talent who could effectively deliver the TajRupt and AI Academy curricula. 

The Fintech Startup: zypl.ai

In 2020, students and teachers at TajRupt’s AI Academy launched several applied research projects aimed at employing graduates while stimulating more demand for machine learning talent in Tajikistan’s financial services and telecommunications sectors. One of these projects led to the creation of zypl.ai, a fintech startup that leveraged machine learning for credit scoring, significantly improving the speed and accuracy of underwriting microloans of up to $3,000 for the unbanked in Tajikistan. 

Given that microloans made up a substantial share of loan portfolios in Tajikistan and other Central Asian countries, zypl.ai not only addressed a pressing financial need, but also showcased the commercial viability of domestically-developed AI solutions. Through zypl.ai’s success, Azimi and his team were able to demonstrate the high market potential of AI-driven financial innovation in Tajikistan.

Unlike most AI startups at the time, zypl.ai benefited from Tajikistan’s relatively low labor costs and access to expert-level AI scientists from markets like Russia, allowing it to develop sophisticated technology while maintaining operational profitability. However, like most AI startups, global investors sought a billion-dollar valuation, pushing zypl.ai to expand beyond its home market. While its rapid success in Central Asia and the Middle East was impressive, achieving unicorn status required a strategic relocation to a major expansion hub, leading the company to establish operations in the UAE in 2024. 

By 2024, zypl.ai contributed to the country’s AI strategy and Azimi’s vision by creating high-skilled employment for Tajik talent, attracting foreign investment, and bringing top-tier international expertise into the country. Despite this early momentum, zypl.ai had all the normal growing pains and risks of any startup venture. Further, as a VC-backed seed stage company, it would need to dramatically and rapidly expand its business into new markets and offerings, to fulfill its investors’ ambitions of a “unicorn” exit. Doing so would likely force the company, and in turn Azimi as the CEO, to move beyond the company’s Tajik roots and workforce.

The Public Sector: The AI Council 

Following the ratification of the AI Strategy, Minister Sherali Kabir convened leaders from the private sector and public research universities to form the independently governed AI Council, with Azimi serving as chair. The AI Council’s primary role was to act as a bridge between industry, computer science researchers, and government officials to stimulate AI-driven entrepreneurship and foster the creation of more businesses like zypl.ai. 

Azimi had outlined the need for such a cross-sectoral entity in his 2021 master’s thesis. Drawing lessons from zypl.ai’s development and Silicon Valley’s success, he argued that close collaboration between industry and advanced research institutions, combined with business-friendly government regulation and access to capital, could catalyze Tajikistan’s own innovation ecosystem, like a Silicon Valley. The AI Council’s sole mission would be to advocate for the policies and conditions necessary to make this vision a reality. To do so, the AI Council focused on three key efforts: demonstrating use cases of AI to stimulate private sector interest, advocating for national AI upskilling efforts, and lobbying for the development of curated economic zones, like Area AI. 

As a subdivision of Minister Kabir’s office of Industry and New Technologies, the AI Council’s influence and finances primarily derived from Minister Kabir and Azimi’s political capital. In 2024, the AI Council successfully secured Tajikistan President Emamoli Rahmon’s endorsement and approval of the first AI Park to be built in the city’s capital, laying the groundwork for the Area AI vision. This initiative granted the AI Council the opportunity to shape the nation’s AI development framework, crafting policies that provided AI startups with regulatory freedom, incentives, and access to data, essential conditions for fostering an AI sector within Tajikistan.