Instagram-addicted, iPhone-loving Iran could be the next hot startup scene

Tehran’s Azadi Tower. Image credit: Panagiotis Papadopoulos.

It’s a country with more people than South Korea, a tech-savvy population, and better banking infrastructure than much of Southeast Asia. Its citizens burn it up on Instagram, and its startups are starting to eye opportunities abroad.

One last hint: if you’re running a startup there, you won’t have access to Google Analytics for your website because of US sanctions.

Iran’s startup ecosystem is young, vibrant, and expanding fast. After spending years off the international grid, the country is making up for lost time. Of Iran’s 80-plus million people, around half are younger than 35 – and they’ve spent the last few years building a bustling tech ecosystem from scratch.

A very recent boom

“Iranians are really engaged in innovation – when a new technology comes, you can see a lot of early adopters in the country,” says Alireza Jozi. “We’re still in the inception stage; the [startup] ecosystem as we know it is three years old now.”

Mobile data is so cheap that the government wants to define the lowest price.

Last summer, Alireza, along with friends Hamed Jafari and MohammadReza Azali, founded TechRasa. It’s essentially Tech in Asia or TechCrunch for Iran, written in English for readers all over the world.

In 2012, the entrepreneurial meetup group Startup Weekend ran its first event in Tehran with the support of a local NGO, the Iran Entrepreneurship Association. By the turn of 2013, it was clear that the program had tapped into something big.

“The thing that we call the ‘startup ecosystem’ and ‘community’ – the spark was all in 2013,” says Alireza. “Startup Weekend got widespread really fast, even in remote corners of Iran. We’ve seen Startup Weekends organized in cities whose names we’d never heard of.”

The TechRasa team. From L to R: Hamed Jafari, MohammadReza Azali, Alireza Jozi

“Before Startup Weekend, there was no startup community,” adds Hamed. “People were working individually, and there weren’t many events.”

That’s when other components began developing as well. Investors hungry for the next big thing, accelerators eyeing promising startups, and government agencies eager to promote development all flocked to college campuses and helped support startup events.

Around the same time, another huge shift happened in Iran – one telco’s 3G monopoly expired, leading to a boom in mobile internet speeds and plummeting prices.

Millions of iPhones

Post it to the ‘gram

The local players

Full speed ahead