OSNOVA AI startup from Uzbekistan has attracted $124,000 in investments from UC Ventures

UC Ventures invested $124,000 in OSNOVA AI — a Uzbek startup that launched as an educational platform but pivoted in its second year.

OSNOVA AI is a suite of AI agents that help businesses solve various tasks — onboarding and employee training, personnel assessment, creating online courses, AI trainers, and talent identification. OSNOVA AI is developing a platform for employee training and assessment, where artificial intelligence performs part of the work of HR specialists and instructional designers. This is the fund’s second investment in the project. OSNOVA has raised over $350,000 in total investments. The company’s clients include SQB, Ipotekabank OTP Group, UNG Academy, and B&B.

OSNOVA’s core product is an AI course builder. An HR specialist describes the task in plain language, for example, “we need an onboarding program for new cashiers,” and uploads company documents: regulations, sales scripts, and instructions.

OSNOVA launched in spring 2024 as a career platform for youth: career aptitude tests and courses in marketing, HR, and digital skills in Uzbek and Russian. The team initially published its first courses on a third-party platform and moved to developing its own solution after confirming demand. OSNOVA now has around 150,000 registered users, more than 6,000 of whom are corporate users.

Kamila Uzakova, CEO and co-founder of OSNOVA
In corporate training, we have been working for eight years and have consistently observed one problem: employee training, assessment, and development happen in separate places, and people-related decisions are made based on intuition. That’s why we chose to focus on business. Working with companies reveals which skills the market truly needs, and using this data, we develop our other offerings. UC Ventures’ repeat investment confirms that this choice was correct.

The decision to provide follow-on funding by UC Ventures was made following joint work with the team during the project’s initial development stage. The new investments will go toward platform and AI feature development. Over the next six months, OSNOVA plans to add nine modules that cover an employee’s journey from their first day to promotion.

In September, an AI trainer will launch: employees interact with a virtual client via voice or text, and after the conversation, receive a breakdown of errors. In October, an HR process builder will be released. An HR specialist sets up a scenario once, and then the platform automatically assigns a program to new hires on their start date, sends reminders about deadlines, checks assessment results, and notifies managers.

Anton Chekhov, co-founder and CPTO of OSNOVA
In a company with a thousand employees, HR spends most of their time assigning courses, compiling spreadsheets, and sending deadline reminders. We want the platform to handle this work, leaving HR to focus on people-related decisions. The AI course builder is already in use by clients; the next step is agents that take over the entire onboarding and assessment process.