At a time when the world feels increasingly divided between East and West, Uzbekistan has emerged as a rare middle ground, as 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 Ventures.

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 hit unicorn status in March last year.

Founded in 2022, Uzum started its journey in Uzbekistan with an e-commerce marketplace called Uzum Market, and shortly after its success, the startup added fintech with a debit card and later expanded into its express food delivery service, Uzum Tezkor.

Uzum currently boasts over 17 million monthly active users — nearly half of Uzbekistan’s adult population, or about two-thirds of all smartphone users in the country — and 16,000 merchants. In the first half of 2025 alone, the startup recorded $250 million in gross merchandise value (GMV), up nearly 1.5 times 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. That product has already issued 2 million cards and is on track to surpass 5 million by year-end. Meanwhile, Uzum’s unsecured lending business hit $200 million in financed volume in Q1, 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 jump.

With a portfolio spanning e-commerce, fintech, and digital banking, how has a startup just over three years old managed to scale this quickly — and draw the attention of 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 the country’s culture, consumer behavior, and business environment — and pairing that with the technical and operational expertise that global companies have developed — has been critical to building a business that can scale quickly and sustainably.

The startup built its digital and physical infrastructure from scratch to kick off its business in Uzbekistan. This includes setting a logistics capacity that has grown to than 112,000 square meters, with a storage capacity of 1.1 million square feet, allowing it to process more than 200,000 orders per day.

The startup has also set up more than 1,500 pickup points across 450 cities, towns, settlements, and villages in the country to enable next-day deliveries. These pickup points also allow the issuance and distribution of Uzum Bank cards.

“Betting on local expertise and infrastructure in frontier markets gives you an advantage to then perform and scale your business very fast,” Djumaev told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview.

Initially, Uzum operated on a fulfilled-by-operator model to enable e-commerce deliveries. It has since expanded to include fulfillment-by-seller and delivery-by-seller options, with a goal of routing 20–30% of deliveries through these new models. These new delivery models will also help Uzum expand its stock-keeping units, which are currently over 1.5 million available for its next-day delivery service, up from over 600,000 SKUs at the time of its last funding announcement in March 2024.

When asked what brought Tencent onto its cap-table this time, Uzum’s chief strategy and business development officer, Nikolay Seleznev, told TechCrunch the startup’s strong growth metrics convinced the Chinese investor to come on board after several quarters of ongoing discussions.

Uzum plans to grow its fintech business by introducing a deposit product in September and a long-term (more than 12 months in maturity) credit facility for its B2C customers. The startup also plans to expand its merchant base and help its existing and new merchants with its QR code payment processing system, expand its Visa debit card program, and build new products to support small and medium enterprises in the country.

Similarly, the startup plans to introduce new products adding value-added services to its e-commerce business, including those helping to generate advertisement revenues. It is also working toward scaling its financial infrastructure further with AI increasingly embedded across credit scoring, fraud protection, and personalized user experiences.

Furthermore, Uzum plans to open up its e-commerce marketplace for international merchants, beginning with those in China and Turkey in September.

“We are expecting 10 to 15% of cross-border activity coming from these countries,” Seleznev said.

The startup has over 12,000 people in its workforce, including blue-collar workers at its pickup points, as well as tech, engineering, and product teams across all its business verticals.

Similar to other businesses of its sort, which are profitable and have multiple avenues to generate continuous income over time, Uzum has plans to become public in the medium term. But before that, it aims to raise a Series B round of $250–$300 million in the first half of 2026.

That said, the startup has so far raised $137 million in equity, including the latest round.