PASHA Holding is looking for startups not only in Azerbaijan but across the entire region, matching them to the specific needs of its portfolio companies.
This was stated on Thursday by Tugra Musayeva, head of innovation at PASHA Financial Holding, at the CAMCA 2026 Regional Forum in Baku during the session "Regional Synergies: Designing the Next Digital Silk Road."
According to her, the group runs a program in which its companies work with startups and implement technological solutions through pilot projects. A successful pilot in one company becomes a recommendation for other companies in the group.
"We select startups from the region to meet the needs of our companies: in banking, insurance, e-commerce and other areas. When a pilot at one company is successful, the solution is passed on to other companies in the group. They trust each other's experience: if a solution worked in one company, it will likely help another. Today this has become standard practice within the group," said Musayeva.
"The local market is not enough, so we look for solutions at the regional level. For a startup, this provides what is hardest to get: a first client in a new market. Instead of entering a new country, building relationships from scratch and spending a year searching for a first client, it gets an entry point through our group," she noted.
Speaking about investments, Musayeva discussed the work of the venture fund INMerge VC, which began investing in January this year. To date, the fund has made six investments, and its portfolio has been regional from the start: it includes startups from Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Georgia and Turkey.
"We see more and more founders who are solving not local but regional problems. The region's advantage is that the problems are very similar: payments and transfers, small business lending, connecting clients to digital financial services. If a founder has found a technical solution that is easy to scale and does not need to build a product from scratch to expand, for example, from Uzbekistan to Azerbaijan, we are immediately interested," said Musayeva.
