Our People > Daniel Abdyldaev

Daniel Abdyldaev

Contributor

Daniel Abdyldaev is the Chief Investment Officer of Accelerate Prosperity, the largest startup accelerator in the Kyrgyz Republic; Managing Partner at ADVentures, a venture capital fund supporting founders across Central Eurasia; and Co-Founder of chANGELS, a leading angel investment network. Daniel teaches Startup Building at Compass College, the leading creative industries college in the Kyrgyz Republic.

Articles

Women entrepreneurs

From Coasters to Code: Bermet Koshoeva’s Leap into Tech Entrepreneurship

Five years ago, spotting Kyrgyz tech entrepreneurs in global accelerators was almost unheard of. Even locally, tech founders were rare. Fast forward to today, and it feels like Kyrgyz innovators are making their mark, especially at Antler. Last year, the global startup accelerator welcomed several Kyrgyz founders in its Vietnam and Malaysia cohorts. Among them is Bermet Koshoeva, a marketing professional turned tech entrepreneur with her startup, Onion. An Unconventional Path Koshoeva’s path to becoming a founder is far from traditional. Her early years followed a familiar trajectory, earning a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Turkey’s Fatih University and working in marketing roles. Things took a unique turn when she pursued a Master’s degree in Agriculture through the prestigious Erasmus Mundus Programme, studying in Denmark and France. The agricultural focus was symbolic, as both her father and grandfather worked in the sector. However, Koshoeva’s studies steered her in a different direction. During her Master’s thesis, Koshoeva had her first entrepreneurial experience. While exploring investment opportunities, she stumbled upon the potential for sellers on Amazon. With an initial investment of $1,000, she started selling mug coasters and managed to turn it into $2,500. “When my studies were coming to an end, I wondered what I would do next and how I would earn a living,” Koshoeva told The Times of Central Asia. “I wasn’t emotionally ready to jump into a full-time job after such an intense academic experience, so I decided to invest in something.” Her Amazon success, combined with her professional marketing background, established Koshoeva as a local marketing expert. She shared her expertise as both a professional consultant and an educator, teaching marketing at the American University of Central Asia and serving as the Head of Creative Business at Compass College, the first art and design college in Central Asia. Onion’s Mission Koshoeva founded Onion in October 2024, originally envisioning it as a platform for collecting and analyzing qualitative research data, such as interviews and surveys. This aligned closely with her marketing background. However, a pivotal experience at Antler Malaysia in April 2025 led her to refine Onion’s focus. During the accelerator program, she pivoted to addressing AI-powered search optimization. The new direction positions Onion in a rapidly evolving space as search trends shift away from traditional Google results to AI-driven tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity. These emerging tools are still refining their contextual accuracy, but they represent the future. Onion helps brands become visible in these AI-powered searches, ensuring they appear when it matters most. Challenges and Vision Although Antler Malaysia eventually decided not to invest in Onion, Koshoeva is determined to push forward. Her analytical skills, honed over years of market research, are guiding her through this emerging niche. “In recent years, I’ve conducted extensive market analyses across various industries, including IT and SaaS,” Koshoeva told TCA. “Through research, I’ve identified a promising niche that’s only beginning to take shape. While not everyone sees its potential yet — even Antler wasn’t ready to invest — I’m...

9 months ago

Immigration

The Kyrgyz AI Startup Making U.S. Immigration Simpler

These days, public debate is dominated by the issues of immigration and AI. But until the emergence of the new startup Alma, they had existed as entirely separate discussions. Alma's co-founder Aizada Marat, raised in Kyrgyzstan, has been one of the first to ask: can AI be used to simplify immigration? Marat first came to the U.S. as a FLEX (Future Leaders Exchange) student when she was 17, before graduating from Harvard Law School in 2015. It was then that her own immigration problems began. Due to visa issues, Marat had to move to London, before coming back to America three years later. “Since relocating to the Bay Area in 2018 [for family reasons] the seed of becoming a founder was planted in my head.” Marat has said on her social media. “When I moved back to the U.S., that's when the immigration nightmare began. As I would with any other service provider, I used Google to find lawyers who could help me with my immigration process. I found a firm. I hired them. I was given the wrong advice. That advice led me to almost miss out on a job offer that, thankfully, I later secured. I also couldn't travel and see my family during that time. With that frustration in mind, I realized I had to start a company to solve the problem professionals were facing.” [caption id="attachment_32658" align="aligncenter" width="2048"] Image: Aizada Marat/Alma[/caption] Before Marat could become an entrepreneur, she needed to learn more about business. This is how she ended up at McKinsey, one of the leading global consulting firms. Soon after, Alma was born. Alma is a legal-tech startup, which uses AI to simplify the immigration process. The company was founded in October 2023 by Marat and Assel Tuleubayeva, a former product manager at Step. A month later the startup secured $500,000 of investments from Village Global, John Hale, and other angel investors. In March 2024 Marat and Tuleubayeva found Shuo Chen, who was previously a manager with Uber. In July 2024 Alma raised $5.1 million in combined seed and pre-seed rounds from leading venture capital funds..Last month it was selected for Google Cloud’s AI Accelerator. Alma was founded as a company offering solutions for law firms, but in 2024 it took the decision to help professionals directly, without any intermediaries. Marat, Tuleubayeva and Chen are immigrants themselves, who combined have had to apply for around 15 separate visas to allow them to work in the U.S. This month Alma reached over 300 clients, including both B2C and B2B. “I'm an immigrant who went through the immigration maze myself, so this is deeply personal", Marat tells The Times of Central Asia. "With my legal and business background, starting Alma made perfect sense. Immigrants drive the U.S. economy, and to stay competitive in the AI race, we need to help the best talent achieve their American dream." She adds: “Alma disrupts the immigration in the US and forever streamlines it for the better. Small and big companies...

9 months ago

Start-ups

Central Asia Startup Cup: A Call for Regional Unity Through Innovation

There has been a significant growth in tech events in Central Eurasia throughout the last few years. Several years back you would only see these on a national level, it is hard to find something that isn’t regional these days. There is the Central Eurasian Venture Forum, the largest regional venture capital forum, which will take place on June 5 this year in Kazakhstan, which is also home to Digital Almaty and Digital Bridge. Tashkent has its ICT Week on September 23-26, 2025. Tajikistan hosts the Startupstan Summit, Georgia has the Central Eurasia Venture Summit, Azerbaijan the Baku ID & INMerge, and the list goes on. At the end of last month, Bishkek hosted the Central Asia Startup Cup, the largest tech conference to date in the Kyrgyz Republic focused on startups and venture capital. As reflected in the name of the event, the country is not an exception and is following the trend of regional cooperation. The keynote speaker came from the UK, Kyrgyz Republic-born Asel Sartbaeva, the CEO and Co-Founder of EnsiliTech, a startup with a technology that allows vaccines and other biopharmaceuticals to be stored and transported at room temperature. Aside from her keynote speech and presentation, Sartbaeva also participated in a panel session devoted to female founders. For the first time in the history of the Kyrgyz Republic, there were a huge array of venture capital investors — apart from domestic investors, the Central Asia Startup Cup hosted venture capital funds from Georgia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkey, the UK, and Uzbekistan. The government’s interest in the startup ecosystem is also growing — a memorandum of cooperation was signed between Accelerate Prosperity, the organizing party of the conference, and the Ministry of Digital Development of the Kyrgyz Republic. Also, for the first time, the regional final of the Startup World Cup, organized in partnership with Pegasus Tech Ventures (USA), was held as a part of the Central Asia Startup Cup. The latter is a global contest with 100+ regional events held across North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia, with each regional winner competing in the final in Silicon Valley. Porte Tech, a startup from Kazakhstan providing digital concierge solutions for hotels, was selected for the Startup World Cup Grand Final in San Francisco and will compete in for a $1,000,000 investment fund in October 2025. A traditional part of such tech conferences, the Startup Battle took place on the second day of the Central Asia Startup Cup, with eight teams reaching the finals. The Grand Prix of the conference and an equity-free prize of $10,000 were awarded to ArtSkin, a Kyrgyz hardware startup developing artificial skin for prosthetic limbs. Seven teams were also recognized with cash prizes of €5,000 each from the European Union's Last-mile Connectivity to Promote Digital Green Education Opportunities project: Nomado, Tez Jumush, Sound Vision, Edu Test, WeSave, TilZone, and The Tech. VoiceDiary, an AI companion for emotional support, received a trip to Silicon Valley as part of the Dive into Silicon...

10 months ago

Vaccination

Meet the Kyrgyz Woman Behind the Vaccine Revolution

COVID-19 exposed numerous challenges humanity has yet to address, with one of them being directly related to tackling potential future pandemics. A key aspect of this is vaccines, which have to be transported in refrigerated units. This allows them to maintain their effectiveness and safety, the so-called "cold chain infrastructure" saving them from becoming unusable. This complex transportation requirement, however, results in millions of people missing out on potentially life-saving vaccines. But does it have to be this complicated? “Motherhood changes people, irreversibly. For me it was not just becoming a parent, but it also influenced the direction of my research,” Asel Sartbaeva wrote in her 2018 article, ‘Vaccines: The End of the Cold War?’ “When my daughter was only a few days old, I took her to the doctors to be vaccinated with the BCG vaccine (against tuberculosis). The doctor took the vaccine out of the fridge and administered it directly. That’s when I asked: ‘why must vaccines be refrigerated?’ and then the natural follow-up question, ‘can I help to make them stable at room temperatures?’” Born and raised in Kyrgyzstan, Asel Sartbaeva “currently wears several hats”, as her LinkedIn profile says. She is an award-winning interdisciplinary chemist, Reader in Chemistry (Associate Professor) at the University of Bath, and the first Central Asian to obtain a PhD from University of Cambridge. Sartbaeva is also the CEO and Co-Founder of EnsiliTech, a startup with a technology that allows vaccines and other biopharmaceuticals to be stored and transported at room temperature. EnsiliTech was launched in 2022 as a project at the University of Bath, and was built on over a decade of Sartbaeva’s research into ensilication – the technique of fitting vaccine components with a silica coat to stop them from spoiling outside of refrigerated temperatures. In December 2022, EnsiliTech successfully raised £1.2 million in an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round led by Science Angel Syndicate and the Fink Family Office with co-investment from QantX, Elbow Beach Capital, angel investors and Innovate UK. In 2023, the startup won a £1.7 million grant from the British government’s Department of Health and Social Care to develop the first thermally stable mRNA vaccine in the world, to combat Hantavirus, which is found in Asia and South America. In the same year, the new startup attracted their first customer, a Global Top 10 animal vaccine company based in the EU, which paid EnsiliTech to thermally stabilise three of their vaccines. Currently, Ensilitech is planning to licence their ensilcation technology to several customers and internally developing thermally stable vaccines and antibodies. Along with her scientific and business goals, Sartbaeva is also passionate about the wider participation and girls and the women’s empowerment movement. “We need to show girls that science isn’t boring and is a great choice for girls who have a natural passion for science,” she says. In 2021, Sartbaeva became the ambassador for UNICEF’s Girls in Science programme, launched in 2020 to empower 500 girls from new settlements and rural areas so they could excel...

11 months ago

Start-ups

Are Innovative Industries One of the Kyrgyz Republic’s Opportunities to Prosper?

The emergence of AI is considered by many to be a major tectonic shift, much like the emergence of the internet in its time. It is hard to overestimate the role innovation plays in our lives, with founders all over the world trying to pioneer our way out of the next problem. At first glance, the Kyrgyz Republic’s tech sector does not represent anything particularly meaningful. The chances of the small landlocked country - the farthest from any ocean in the world, which is the most affordable mode of shipping mode - integrating into innovative global ecosystems on its own seem wholly unrealistic. However, if we look at the dynamics of development in its tech sector, the potential is there. Is there a chance that the Kyrgyz Republic can become a part of the global tech scene? [caption id="attachment_30359" align="aligncenter" width="1440"] Image: The World in Maps[/caption] According to Ashley Vance at Bloomberg, “It’s about a landlocked nation, one with very few natural resources, hoping to gen up a tech industry on the fly.” The Kyrgyz startup ecosystem is clearly in its nascent stages, meaning that you haven’t heard about the Kyrgyz Skype. Yet. The country’s position in the Global Innovation Index in 2024 is 99th, up from 106th in 2023. The Global Startup Ecosystem Index, meanwhile, has the Kyrgyz Republic lower than 100th place in its 2024 ranking, down from 99th in 2023. “The country has maintained second position in Central Asia and seventh in the Central Asia Regional Economic Cooperation Program (CAREC) business region,” according to this index. The Kyrgyz Republic’s VC ranking of 103rd in the Venture Capital & Private Equity Country Attractiveness has barely changed over the last couple of years. When compared to peer group economies, it is obvious that the Kyrgyz Republic needs significant improvements in the depth of the capital market, social environment, entrepreneurial opportunities, and economic activity. [caption id="attachment_30358" align="aligncenter" width="1796"] Image: Venture Capital & Private Equity Country Attractiveness Index 2023[/caption] In terms of the number of venture capital deals, the Kyrgyz Republic is still lagging behind its neighbors. Out of $110+ million of venture capital funding in the region in 2023, the Kyrgyz contribution was only a fraction at $1.1 million. In 2024, this increased to $1.7 million, however, with the country's first venture capital law soon to be adopted. [caption id="attachment_30357" align="aligncenter" width="826"] Image Venture Capital in Central Asia 2024[/caption] The High Technology Park of the Kyrgyz Republic, which is a special tax regime for IT companies targeting exports, is demonstrating a steady growth, with its revenue expanding from under a million in 2013, to a more impressive $130 Million in 2024. The park’s residents are mostly companies providing IT outsourcing for developed markets, but the signs of a turn towards launching their own IT products are there. A separate world-first Creative Industries Park has also been set up to support the country's creative industries, including startups. When it comes to the largest Kyrgyz startups, they are founded by Kyrgyz nationals,...

12 months ago