BAKU, Azerbaijan, March 30
By Matanat Nasibova – Trend:
Azerbaijan conducts large work on stimulating development of startups in the field of financial technologies, Vusal Gasimli, Executive Director of Azerbaijan’s Center for Analysis of Economic Reforms and Communication (CAERC) told Trend.
According to him, incubators and accelerators have been created in the country, the task of which is to provide mentoring and consulting services, as well as assisting startups in developing their business plans and conducting relevant documentation operations.
“We should largely dwell on “Enterprise Azerbaijan” portal, which is an electronic database of ideas and projects. According to the Artificial Intelligence Report issued by Stanford University, such communication issues as increasing public awareness and enhancing education measures, increasing the motivation of startups, arranging meetings of investors and authors of projects, raising the level of information content and projects are also considered priority and highly important areas in the process of introducing artificial intelligence and developing financial technologies,” Gasimli said.
“For this purpose, Fintech summit and various conferences on this topic are annually held in Azerbaijan. These events, which have become a real platform, assist in organizing and conducting meetings between interested parties," he noted.
Further, the executive director expressed an opinion on the main trends of the startup financing mechanism in the world.
"CB Insights, being the largest big data company, global worldwide network and data platform, published Companies Changing the World 2020 report. According to the report, 23 of the 36 companies that have the potential to change the world were established or later moved to the US. This once again demonstrates that the US has the most advanced global innovation ecosystem. As a result, the majority of innovative projects developed in other countries apply to the US and use the ecosystem of this country to expand their scope of activity to take advantage of large market opportunities and a range of networking," said Gasimli.
“Along with this, Canada, Israel, Sweden, Singapore and the UK also rank correspondingly in the report. I’d like to draw attention to the fact that over 200 unique investors have invested in the above 36 companies, even 20 investors have simultaneously invested in a number of projects. Therefore, the Enterprise Azerbaijan portal, INNOLAND incubation center and our other incubators and accelerators are preparing our startups for global markets," Gasimli said.
Speaking about the specific ICT areas, in which those or other enterprises that were called as those "changing the world", Gasimli noted that in the list of enterprises, divided into 12 categories, mainly those functioning in the health sector rank in leading positions.
"We are talking about predicting the structure of the artificial intelligence basis, electric pulse therapy, replacing chemicals, treating mental mental diseases, including intellectual and nervous disorders with non-harmful and non-addictive means, a DNA database that allows to carry out an effective exchange of genetic data that are of importance for the development of health care, etc.,” he said.
"Other categories include artificial intelligence, quantum cryptography, intellectual (smart) control of carbon emissions, next-generation nuclear energy technologies and microchips that perform calculations at the speed of light. The greatest interest among them is the creation of microchips. Microchip is a processor based on photon technology that has unprecedented power to perform operations," Gasimli said.
“In the period of the predominance of "Big Data", new-generation computers require ever higher speed and power to perform certain operations. The companies of this category, which presently carry out activities in this direction, are working on replacing the electron-electric transmissions in microchips with an optical-photon transmission," Gasimli said.
“Domestic startups, guided by the world trends, should pay more and more attention to technological and social projects,” he said.