Uzum has now officially reached a new, very special, unicorn valuation of $1.5 billion. This new milestone firmly places it as Uzbekistan’s first-ever unicorn amid the booming e-commerce and fintech industry. Uzum burst onto the global stage in 2022 and almost immediately opened its aperture. It started with an e-commerce marketplace as Uzum Market and a little later expanded into digital banking with Uzum Bank and operates a food delivery service.
Then in August 2022, Uzum opened its digital banking subsidiary, Uzum Bank. With their launch, the new bank rolled out a co-branded Visa debit card, which includes high pre-approved credit limits. This strategic initiative focused on expanding financial inclusivity among users and embedding banking capabilities within the e-commerce infrastructure. The company’s ingenuity and creativity amidst fierce competition in the rapidly developing fintech ecosystem has been a hallmark of the company’s remarkable growth path.
Uzum’s journey started with the vision of transforming online shopping in Uzbekistan. From the beginning, its focus was on creating a dependable nationwide e-commerce marketplace. Recently, it has widened its scope to provide other services, such as Uzum Tezkor, an express food delivery service. This diversification has helped Uzum meet multiple consumer needs and grow its user base by nearly 40% in just six months.
The company just closed a remarkable $65.5 million in new funding. The round was co-led by China’s Tencent and the New York- and London-based firm VR Capital. This latest capital infusion further demonstrates the confidence investors have in Uzum’s innovative business model. It lays the ground for ever further widening its reach. So far, Uzum has secured a total of $137 million in equity across six rounds of funding.
Uzum has established that digital and physical infrastructure from the ground up to serve the marketplace throughout Uzbekistan. The company has established over 1,500 pickup points in more than 450 cities, towns, settlements, and villages, enhancing its logistics capabilities. Today, Uzum’s logistics operations span more than 112,000 square meters, with a storage capacity that accommodates 1.1 million square feet.
This far-reaching network allows Uzum to manage more than 200,000 orders per day. It showcases the company’s new operational efficiency and its ability to match the growing consumer demand. To make customer experience even better, Uzum has expanded its reach by providing next-day delivery services for more than 1.5 million stock-keeping units (SKU).
The company’s rapid expansion is not confined to e-commerce. It has recently announced major advancements in the space of unsecured lending. In the first three months of this year, Uzum’s unsecured lending business took off to hit $200 million in financed volume. That’s a staggering 3.4 times increase over this same period last year. This stellar performance is a testament to the changing dynamics of credit demand in Uzbekistan’s market and the growing importance of client-centered change.
GMV on Uzum skyrocketed to $250 million in just the first half of 2025. This tremendous number is almost one and a half times more than last year. As of late 2023, the platform had more than 17 million active users per month. It collaborates with about 16,000 sellers, making a robust marketplace model ecosystem.
Uzum’s leadership understands that in frontier markets, the best solutions come from tapping into local expertise and existing infrastructure. Djasur Djumaev emphasized this strategy, stating, “Betting on local expertise and infrastructure in frontier markets gives you an advantage to then perform and scale your business very fast.”
Looking beyond the pandemic, Uzum intends to IPO in the medium term as a key part of its growth strategy. The company is now further looking to build on its work expanding its cross-border activities. As Seleznev pointedly remarked, “We are looking forward to receiving 10 to 15% of cross-border activity originating from these countries.”