A 20-year-old Uzbek entrepreneur raised $500,000 in funding through a startup.

Bahodir Rajabov, San Francisco, CEO, Instagram

How did it all begin?

I am originally from Bukhara. I started programming at the age of 14—my first project was a Telegram bot created simply out of curiosity. As a child, I watched the “Hashtag” show about technology, but at that time, I didn’t understand how any of it worked. Later, in a computer science class, I wrote my first program in Pascal, and it was exactly at that moment that something awakened in my heart. I didn’t stop there.

Over time, I delved deeper into the field. I created Telegram bots that downloaded videos from TikTok and Instagram, which later evolved into large-scale projects with hundreds of thousands of users. While working on these projects, I encountered for the first time the real scale and all the “pain points” of products dependent on scraping and external APIs. After all, these APIs are constantly changing and unstable.

Later, I developed an AI lawyer based on artificial intelligence, and then the GetIntercall platform, which translates in real time. This was likely my most technically complex project. It required real-time multilingual transcription, speaker diarization, handling signal delays, and ensuring accuracy that professional translators could trust.

Each product taught me something unique. However, one situation repeated itself across all of them: creating the app was the easiest part. Monetization—that is, payments, taxes, hosting, and legal infrastructure—was where most people, including myself at the time, got stuck.

This is exactly why the Surgent project was born. The idea behind it is simple: to give anyone the ability to create their own software and generate revenue from it, without needing programming skills or dealing with infrastructure headaches.

Launching the startup

I started the Surgent project as a solo-founder in San Francisco. At the start, there was no team and no funding—just me and the product. Thanks to years of independent programming experience, I knew how to move quickly.

My path up to that point went as follows: at 16, I started my first job as a developer at LeverX in Poland. At 17, I worked remotely for a Georgian company, earning nearly $2,000 a month. After some time, I realized I had hit a ceiling in Uzbekistan and needed a different environment. So, I moved to Poland to study. Three to four months later, I received an offer from IBM and decided to drop out of university.

At IBM, I worked on analytical software within the GenAI team. It was a large company with strong experts, but the processes were slow. This experience further solidified a feeling I already had: I wanted to create my own product.

At 20, I moved to San Francisco. The density of founders, engineers, and grand ambitions here cannot be compared to anywhere else in the world. I began building the Surgent project alone. Currently, our active team consists of three people. To be honest, AI agents now write 99% of the code, while I focus primarily on system architecture, research, and project growth.

Target audience

Surgent is a platform designed for people who want to make money online through software but do not know how to program: content creators, indie hackers, and entrepreneurs without technical knowledge. Unlike competitors such as Lovable and Replit, which focus solely on “building an app,” our main goal is to help users “make money with that app.”

Today, creators have only two or three main ways to monetize: ad integrations, online courses, and dropshipping. We are adding a fourth method: creating and selling personal software. The user simply describes their idea, and the platform builds the product, taking care of payments, taxes, hosting, and legal infrastructure. The human focuses their attention on their audience, while Surgent handles everything else.

Our business model consists of a subscription fee for using the platform and a commission on each transaction. At the same time, to allow our users to accept payments from any country without being tied to Stripe, we are building our own payment infrastructure.

Achievements

We raised $500,000 in investment at the Pre-Seed stage. The round was formalized under standard Y Combinator terms in SAFE format.

The Whop platform, an American platform for monetizing digital products, and its CEO, Steven Schwartz, invested in our project. Interestingly, they initially reached out to us. The first offer was in the form of an acqui-hire: they invited us to join the Whop team and develop the product within their company. The terms were very attractive: a salary of nearly $1 million per year plus a share of the business. However, since we wanted to build Surgent as an independent company, we declined the offer.

After that, Steven offered to invest $500,000 in our project. Such an early-stage investment signifies not only confidence in the product but also, in many ways, in us—the founders. They see a trend similar to ours: the next wave of monetization for creators will revolve around personal software, not online courses or closed groups. This trust is very significant for us.

We are directing the raised funds toward accelerating product development, expanding the user acquisition scope, creating our own payment infrastructure, and achieving key metrics important for the next round.

About challenges

The environment in which I started was one of the first challenges. In Bukhara, internet and computer technology were weak, and there were no mentors around me to guide me. I learned mostly independently, online. Looking back, I realize that these limitations may have slowed my technical development, but they also toughened me up. And I am grateful for the path I have taken.

A separate topic is health. This is indeed a serious issue. Working in front of a monitor for 14–15 hours a day for years, poor nutrition, and lack of sleep—all of these eventually took their toll. Real health problems emerged. If I could go back, I would be much more careful with myself. If you are physically and mentally exhausted and burnt out, it is absolutely impossible to build anything over the long term.

My created products also taught me great lessons. Projects based on scraping—those bots created for TikTok and Instagram—taught me the most important thing: you cannot build a business on an unstable, foreign foundation. The GetIntercall project showed how complex real-time systems are and how crucial accuracy is when real users depend on your product. Surgent is the project where all these technical and product-related lessons converged.

Speaking about life as a solo founder, the hardest part is focusing your attention in one place. If you don’t have a partner to keep you on the right track, it is very easy to get distracted. On one hand, pressure helps—it creates a sense of urgency and gives you a push. But you need to know how to manage it; otherwise, this pressure starts working against you.

I would give simple advice to those just starting to program: focus all your attention and immerse yourself completely in the process. A large part of the journey seems boring—learning English, going through textbooks, creating products that no one is using yet. But it is precisely this foundation—language and technical skills—that changes everything at a certain point.

Another practical piece of advice: use Twitter. If you are creating a product for the global market, you need to understand its ecosystem, trends, and people—today, a large part of this environment lives there.

Plans

In the next three months, we will focus our attention on rapid growth. We plan to significantly expand our user base, launch our own payment infrastructure, implement deep integration with the Whop platform, and open an AI agent marketplace within the platform.

Our goal for the 12–18 month horizon is to achieve the financial metrics necessary for the next investment round and to make Surgent the number one platform for creators who want to make money through software.

In two years, we aim to help 100,000 users earn at least $1,000 per month through Surgent.

Our long-term mission is to provide every person with the opportunity to create software and make money on the internet. Additionally, we aim to prove that founders from Uzbekistan can build global-scale companies and, over time, reinvest in startups in Uzbekistan.