How two friends from Kyrgyzstan created a $20 million startup

In an interview with The Tech, they shared how they went from small projects in their homeland to Silicon Valley, why they dropped out of university to focus on Siml, and how they aim to build the largest tech company founded by Central Asians.

Zukhair Abdullajanov, San Francisco, CEO and Co-founder, LinkedIn

Nurtilek Raimzhanov, San Francisco, COO and Co-founder, LinkedIn

How It All Started

We met in school and have been friends for over 10 years. Both of us were born in Kyrgyzstan and later came to the US to study. During that time, we launched many small projects. During the pandemic, we sold sanitizers online, then built parsers, AI tools, and an app for managing students' personal finances.

We have always been interested in the opportunities the internet offers and how quickly it changes people's everyday lives.

While studying at MIT and researching data from online marketplaces, I noticed that AI agents were already starting to handle sales-related tasks. They can process massive amounts of data and do in minutes what would take a human hours.

At the same time, e-commerce largely remained unchanged. Store owners still have to manually manage advertising, content, customer support, shipping, inventory, and many other processes.

That’s how the idea for Siml — AI that manages your store was born.

How Siml Works

If Shopify is the storefront, Siml is its operating system. The platform connects to a store, analyzes data, and uses AI agents to manage the processes needed for business operations and growth.

We want Siml to be suitable for everyone — from someone launching their first store to a large brand. Our idea is that in the future, stores won’t just use AI tools — they will be managed by AI.

We see particularly great opportunities in advertising. On the surface, it seems simple, but in reality, brands constantly have to create content, analyze results, test new ideas, study customers, manage budgets, and respond quickly to changes.

We are creating AI agents that can take over these processes and do in a few minutes what usually takes a team hours.

Target Audience

Today, Siml is designed for virtually any seller who wants to work online. If you have an idea, you can use Siml to launch a store. Small businesses can connect the platform to an existing store and automate processes. Large companies use Siml for advertising, automation, and custom solutions.

Currently, the platform is already used by over 100 stores and brands.

We believe that in the coming years, AI will change the shopping process itself. People already use AI assistants to search for products and decide what to buy. In the future, AI agents will be able to compare products, make decisions, and complete purchases on their own.

The same will happen on the seller side. Their stores, advertising, and customer communication will also be handled by AI agents. We want Siml to become the infrastructure for this new way of trading.

About Moving to San Francisco

I remember calling Nurtilek in May and saying, “Bro, we need to move to San Francisco and fully dedicate ourselves to Siml.”

Nurtilek is one of the strongest operational specialists I know. He has a deep understanding of logistics and company management. We have worked together for many years, so I immediately knew I wanted to build this company with him.

At the time, we had offers from Amazon and Shopify for engineering positions. These were good and safe options. But we understood that if we wanted to try building something big, we would have to fully commit to the startup and take significant risks.

In the end, we both left university. I left MIT, and Nurtilek left his program.

We moved to San Francisco and joined Powell Street — one of the well-known hacker houses for founders and developers. In the previous year alone, its members founded eight Y Combinator companies, two companies backed by a16z, and many other startups.

Living there was exciting: there were always people around who were creating, launching, and testing something.

In San Francisco, you can randomly meet the founder of a major tech company near your house, play soccer with billionaires, or see them at the gym. There is a very high concentration of technology, talented people, and ambition. That’s why so many founders come here.

First Investments

We sent a cold email to Corey Levy, the founder of Z Fellows.

Z Fellows started as a program with a $10,000 grant for young founders and eventually became one of the strongest communities for young entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.

Corey is known for his ability to find talented founders at a very early stage. Nine companies from the Z Fellows community have already become unicorns, and many of its participants later received Thiel Fellow status and secured investments from major funds.

We spoke with Corey, and soon he invested in Siml. Later, he introduced us to Collective Global, which also invested in the company.

In just a few weeks, we raised nearly $1 million, and Siml’s valuation reached $20 million. And all of this happened before we turned 21.

We are both 21 now, and we still sometimes marvel at how quickly everything happened.

We also became the first founders from Central Asia to join Z Fellows and receive support from this community.

Among our mentors are the founders of Eventbrite, DoorDash, Anduril, Netflix, Etched, and OpenAI, as well as Sam Altman. It’s important to us not only that these people invested in the company. We benefit from the opportunity to communicate with people who have already built some of the largest tech companies in the world.

Challenges

Creating a product is only part of the work. The hardest part begins when you need to scale the company.

When people read that a startup raised $500,000 or $1 million, they might think the founders have already succeeded. In reality, raising money is just the beginning.

After that, you need to build the product, find more customers, assemble the right team, and prove that the company can grow into something big.

We are still a small team and want to build the most autonomous company possible. We believe that thanks to AI, a small team of strong specialists will be able to create what previously required hundreds or even thousands of employees.

Plans

Our goal is for millions of sellers and stores to use Siml and be able to work as quickly and simply as possible.

For now, we are keeping the team small, growing the company from San Francisco, and focusing on scaling.

We want Siml to become one of the largest tech companies in the world and the largest company ever founded by Central Asians.