How a startup from Kyrgyzstan, Nurai, makes business in messengers easier

Co-founder Bulat Saifudinov explained how their AI platform, Nurai, takes over customer communication in messengers and works like a live assistant.

Bulat Saifudinov, city — Bishkek, IT entrepreneur, Instagram

How it all started

We are the Nurai team, and each of us has a strong background in business automation. For many years, we worked with retail stores, cafes, restaurants, and educational centers. We helped implement POS systems, set up CRM, build sales funnels, and automate processes.

But with the growth in the number of messengers and digital channels, we increasingly noticed the same problem: businesses receive messages from clients, but no one is available to respond. Entrepreneurs don’t have time, employees lack motivation or simply don’t understand how to conduct a proper dialogue. As a result, businesses lose leads, and with them, money.

The idea for Nurai was born as a response to a real business pain point. We wanted to create a platform that not only receives messages from clients but also works as a smart digital assistant: answering questions, consulting, helping with sales — and doing so 24/7. Not a soulless, template-based chatbot, but a flexible assistant that understands, learns, remembers, and adapts to each client. All of this became possible thanks to the rapid development of artificial intelligence, and we realized — the time to act had come.

Startup launch

Nurai’s first steps began in the real battlefield — the businesses of our clients. We manually integrated WhatsApp with CRM, wrote simple scripts, and trained the AI based on live dialogues. This was an honest experiment in real-world conditions: the first users were our own clients, who were “burning” — they were losing leads and were ready to try anything that might work.

We immediately rejected the use of foreign templates and platforms. Nurai is entirely our own development, written by the team in Bishkek. This gives us flexibility, independence, and control over the entire process.

Team

We assembled the team carefully. We don’t have random people. Everyone is passionate about their work and ready to deliver results. Today, we have strong developers, a product manager, a designer, an AI architect, and technical support. All internal team processes are well-structured — we scale quickly without compromising quality.

We have a unique team with strong expertise in key areas. I am the co-founder and technical leader, an architect of high-load systems with over 15 years of development experience. Previously, I created large-scale corporate solutions in retail and automation.

Bektur Adiev — co-founder and commercial director, an expert in B2B sales and business automation, with over 10 years of experience working with entrepreneurs from Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. The product is also developed by a UX/UI designer, an AI architect, and a support team that helps clients quickly launch the platform and achieve initial results.

We believe that people make the product. And everyone on the Nurai team contributes not only professionally but also with heart.

Target audience

Nurai is for any business that receives leads through messengers. From small shops to wholesale companies and exporters.

The service is valued by those who don’t have a sales department or a dedicated messaging manager. The platform replaces several employees, works 24/7, doesn’t get sick, doesn’t take vacations, and doesn’t make mistakes in scripts.

Incubation programs

So far, we haven’t participated in accelerators or taken external investments. We started with our own resources. We set ourselves the task: to create a working product, prove its effectiveness, and only then seek grants, partnerships, and investments.

At the moment, we are ready to participate in accelerators and support programs — with a priority on platforms in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, where we plan to launch soon. We are interested not only in funding but also in access to expert support, local partners, and resources to quickly adapt the product to new markets.

Challenges

The first challenge we faced was distrust of AI. Many thought Nurai was just a button-based bot that responded with templates. We had to prove that Nurai can think, learn, and conduct a dialogue like a living person.

One notable case was an educational center where the service began receiving trial lesson requests via WhatsApp and Telegram. Previously, messages were often lost, especially in the evenings and nights when administrators were unavailable. Today, requests are processed instantly, and the owner notes not only an increase in bookings but also improved trust from new clients. According to him, for the first time in a long while, he started receiving more direct orders — without losses or intermediaries.

Advice for those launching their own startup: don’t be afraid to show an imperfect product. The main thing is that it solves a problem. It will become perfect only after feedback from the first clients.

Achievements

We are already working with more than 20 clients in Kyrgyzstan and have started initial international integrations — in Qatar, the UAE, and China. After implementing Nurai, lead conversion rates consistently grow by 15-20%. This is entirely our own development, independent of foreign platforms, and implementation takes only one to three days — even without involvement of an IT specialist from the client’s side.

Nurai can replace up to three support or sales department employees. The system is already used by a large honey exporter with international offices, as well as educational centers, hotels, and stores. After connecting Nurai, clients confidently increase their advertising budgets, knowing that the system will reliably process every incoming lead.

Plans

By the end of the year, we plan to launch in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, integrate with local payment systems, and release a visual scenario editor. Additionally, we will strengthen our work with artificial intelligence — including adding voice response support — and establish partnerships with CRM and POS systems.

Our global goal is to make Nurai the standard for customer communication through messengers. We want businesses to stop losing leads. We want people to communicate with brands as easily as they do with friends. And we want every entrepreneur to finally breathe a sigh of relief — because Nurai is always online.