Finflow. How a Kazakh AI startup helps businesses manage finances

How It All Began

I am a financier by education: I studied in South Korea and received a bachelor’s degree in international finance. I am also an entrepreneur — this is already my second startup.My first startup was launched in 2018 — ISSU.kz, an e-commerce project.It was a subscription service for beauty products aimed at women: customers paid 30,000 tenge and received a box of cosmetic samples to test. We ran this project for a little over three years, and in 2021 it was acquired.

At the same time, since returning from Korea in 2016–2017, I worked in financial consulting: helping SMEs and other startups with financial management, company valuation, fundraising, and optimizing revenue and expenses. During that time, I helped more than 90 companies.I noticed that 80% of entrepreneurs in Central Asia have serious financial management problems. This led to cash gaps and difficulties in raising capital — whether loans or investments — because they lacked a proper financial accounting system.

I realized I could solve these problems manually, but it was not scalable.

That is how the idea was born — to create an AI-financier, a digital assistant that helps entrepreneurs build financial models, make forecasts, create budgets, and answer financial questions.In summer 2023, together with two co-founders, we decided to fully focus on this project.

Startup Launch

In August 2023, my partners and I decided to go full-time. We had about $20,000 of our own funds to test hypotheses and build the first MVP prototypes.From the start, we targeted the US market, not Central Asia.We built a basic MVP with simple if-else algorithms and a minimal website and started promoting in the US, particularly Silicon Valley.We used LinkedIn outreach, warm intros, demo calls with entrepreneurs, CustDev, and Jobs-to-be-Done interviews.

Pretty quickly we realized that breaking into the US market would be hard: the standards and expectations were extremely high. Customers demanded a flawless product from day one, fully solving their problems — something we, as a young startup with limited resources, could not yet deliver.

After initial results, we pivoted to the local market, offering the product at a more accessible price.With the collected data, we attracted our first angel investment — about $80,000 from local and international investors, including Alibi Sansyzbay, Evgeniy Matveev, and Liven Kavtaradze. With this money, we improved the product, launched a beta version in Kazakhstan, and began promotion.

Results: over $35,000 in revenue and 81 early users, some of whom became paying customers. We received valuable feedback and gained a better understanding of user needs.

Target Audience

Our target audience changed three times. Initially, we focused on startups — early-stage IT companies — helping them build financial models, forecasts, and valuations using AI. But this hypothesis did not hold: startups were not solvent enough.

Then we switched to SMEs, which faced similar but more practical issues: bookkeeping, expense optimization, income and tax calculations, financial planning, and preventing cash gaps. These businesses were more solvent. In the last six months since the beta launch, we gained 80+ early users, 40 of them paying.

However, we discovered another issue — SMEs’ limited access to capital.Small and medium businesses often struggle to secure working capital for growth. So we started working with banks, helping entrepreneurs prepare financial documents in minutes, check for errors, and speed up the loan process.In the end, our target audience is SMEs and the banks that provide them with loans.

Incubation Programs

Back with ISSU.kz, I participated in accelerator programs at Astana Hub. With Finflow, my partners joined the Techpreneurs incubation program at Astana Hub, then continued in the IRA Investment Training Program from MOST.

Currently, I am part of the European Startup Wise Guys accelerator, which helps us scale into Europe and Azerbaijan. The program is online, and the fund also invests in graduates.

We also actively join startup battles and exhibitions. We won at Digital Almaty, earning $15 000 and the title of most scalable startup. We also participated in FAIR.AI in Almaty, where we got access to the Hero Training acceleration program.

Challenges

The first challenge is finding the right customer — the audience with a real pain your product solves. The only way is constant hypothesis testing and direct communication with potential users, gathering feedback on the product, usability, value, and pricing.

The second challenge was development. With a limited budget, we could not afford many senior developers. Complicating things further, we constantly changed features and hypotheses. We solved this by hiring part-time specialists working on multiple projects, aiming for quick releases.

Key advice: start talking to customers and selling as early as possible, even before you have a product. Do not wait for perfection — an MVP, landing page, or website is enough. Start testing sales and acquisition channels.On the development side, as a founder, your main role is to secure funding so the team has resources to deliver fast. That is where angel and venture capital come in.

Another tip: do not wait for a finished product to start fundraising. Building investor relationships takes time. Start early, send monthly updates, meet for coffee. When traction comes, you will get support more easily.

Achievements

A year ago, we raised $80,000. Now we are closing a $500,000 round, 60–70% already secured.

We partnered with two local banks — BCC and RBK — running pilots with their client bases. This is a key milestone since we are working directly with our target audience.We also attracted an international VC fund from Hong Kong — Raccoon Ignite Ventures. They invest in Central Asian startups and plan to lend to SMEs. They also became our client, using Finflow as a financial analysis platform. This is a big achievement, giving us an international client.Our team has eight people, including three co-founders: Amir Shabanov, CTO, and Nurdaulet Samen, COO. Our developers are supported by advisors such as Raushan Sagalbayeva, a Seattle-based financier with 20 years of experience, and Dauren Malaev, ex-CTO of Choco Raketa, Choco Travel/Aviata, with 15+ years in complex system development. We also have commercial and fundraising advisors, including Serik Shanmanov for B2B sales.

I am proud we built such a strong team from the start.

Plans

Over the next year, we plan to grow MRR 10x to $50 000, requiring over 1000 paying clients. We are testing markets in Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan and planning to scale across Central Asia — in Astana, Almaty, Tashkent, and Baku. Our target market is about 3 million SMEs — a very achievable goal.