Uzum just became Uzbekistan’s first unicorn, now valued at around $1.5 billion after raising $65.5 million in a fresh equity round. The August 5 raise was led by Tencent and VR Capital, with FinSight Ventures also backing the deal. That’s nearly a 30% bump from Uzum’s $1.16 billion valuation in March 2024.
Launched in 2022, Uzum started as an e-commerce platform but quickly expanded into buy-now-pay-later (BNPL), food delivery (Uzum Tezkor), and digital banking. The company says 45–50% of e-commerce purchases on its platform go through its BNPL service.
As of mid-2025, it claims 17 million monthly active users—about half the country’s adult population—and works with 16,000 merchants. In the first half of the year, it processed $250 million in gross merchandise volume, up about 1.5× year-over-year.
Uzum also pulled in $150 million in net profit in 2024 (a 50% increase from 2023) and financed $200 million in unsecured loans via BNPL just in Q1 2025—over three times more than a year earlier. It’s issued over 2 million Visa debit cards and plans to hit 5 million by the end of the year.
Behind the scenes, Uzum has built a logistics backbone with 1,500 pickup points in 450 cities, 112,000 square meters of warehouse space, and capacity to handle over 200,000 daily orders. Its inventory has grown to 1.5 million SKUs—more than double what it had in early 2024.
Next up: a bigger $250–300 million Series B in 2026 ahead of a possible IPO. Uzum is also planning a deposit product this September, expanded credit options, tools for merchants, and cross-border e-commerce support—especially for Chinese and Turkish sellers. AI will play a bigger role too, especially in credit scoring and personalization.
The message is clear: Uzum isn’t just building a shopping app. It wants to be the region’s go-to superapp.