Hello from Tashkent — building a university startup ecosystem in Uzbekistan

Hi everyone,

I’m Azizbek Khaitov, Deputy Director of the Acceleration and Incubation Center at Tashkent State University of Economics (TSUE) in Uzbekistan. We help students go from an idea to a business.

At TSUE, we bring students from different disciplines together to build startups around real problems. Our role is to help them combine their expertise, test their ideas with the people they want to serve, and turn what they learn into products and businesses.

We support student founders across all sectors, with particular strengths in FinTech, EdTech, and IT. Our teams can also draw on expertise across the university in economics, finance and banking, accounting, taxation and public finance, business management, tourism, and the digital economy.

I’d love to connect with founders, mentors, and teams running university incubators or accelerators. We’re open to bringing in guest mentors, organising joint pitch feedback sessions, and developing joint projects and grant proposals with international partners. I’m particularly interested in projects that help universities strengthen their incubation programmes and give more students access to entrepreneurship support.

If you’ve worked on a partnership between universities or accelerators, what worked well for your student founders? I’d be happy to exchange ideas and explore what we could build together.