Uzbekistan’s IT service exports reached $392.5 million on figures reported in August 2026, a 30 percent rise. In the first quarter alone, exports through the state-backed IT Park hit $191.8 million, up $38.5 million on the same period a year earlier.
The interesting part is not the growth rate. It is the bottleneck. A country of 37 million cannot export software services at that pace without producing developers, analysts and support staff faster than its universities do, and that gap is where a local edtech sector has quietly assembled itself over the past five years.
Six platforms now carry most of that load. They are worth knowing if you are hiring in the region, investing in frontier edtech, or watching which emerging markets convert a state IT programme into an actual industry.
| Platform | What it does | Scale (company-stated)
|
|---|---|---|
| Mohirdev | Online IT courses in Uzbek | 50,000+ students, 50+ courses |
| Najot Ta’lim | Offline and online IT school with its own placement arm | 12,000+ graduates, 6 branches |
| Prep.uz | Russian language training for work | 3-month mentor programme |
| EduBaza | AI lesson planning for teachers | Launched Jan 2026 |
| Lerna.uz | Course marketplace | 793 courses listed |
| Foreign platforms | Russian-language edtech entering the market | 12 partner schools via Lerna |
The market context, in three numbers
IT Park is the centrepiece of Uzbekistan’s bid to become Central Asia’s leading exporter of digital services, and its scale is now material. Government figures put total membership at 2,846 as of May 2025, with 636 new member companies joining in the first five months of that year, 284 of them export-oriented and 117 of those foreign enterprises.
Those companies sell into more than 60 countries. Roughly 45 percent of export revenue comes from North America, about 26 percent from the Asia-Pacific region and the CIS combined, and around 24 percent from the EU and the UK.
Read that distribution again, because it explains the shape of the training market. A workforce serving North American clients needs English. A workforce serving CIS clients needs Russian. Most of the platforms below are solving for one or the other alongside the technical skill.
1. Mohirdev: the homegrown scale player
Founded in 2021, Mohirdev has become the largest online IT education platform in the country by student count, with more than 50,000 students, 50-plus courses and over 30 mentors on its own numbers. Coverage spans front-end and back-end development, databases, data science and artificial intelligence.
Its defining decision was linguistic. Everything is taught in Uzbek, at a time when most serious technical material in the region was available only in Russian or English. That removed a translation tax for a generation of students schooled in Uzbek, and it is the clearest reason the platform scaled faster than its rivals.
It has raised a $350,000 pre-seed round from AloqaVentures and the UzVC National Venture Capital Fund, which is small by global standards and notable by local ones.
2. Najot Ta’lim: the school that built its own hiring pipeline
Najot Ta’lim, established in 2018, runs the more traditional model: intensive in-person courses, now with an online arm called Edfix. It operates six branches, three in Tashkent plus Fergana, Samarkand and Khorezm, and teaches programming, full-stack development, cybersecurity, machine learning, data analytics and design.
The strategically interesting piece is TechJobs, a separate company it founded in 2020 purely to place its own graduates. The school claims more than 12,000 graduates overall and more than 2,000 placed through TechJobs. Owning the placement layer is how a training business defends its pricing, and it is a pattern worth watching in other frontier markets.
Course fees run from 1,200,000 to 1,800,000 so’m a month, with a 10 percent discount for women and another 10 percent for students holding a C1 or higher English certificate.
The detail that tells the story A coding school in Tashkent discounts tuition for a C1 English certificate. Language proficiency is priced into technical education here, because it is priced into the jobs.
3. Prep.uz: the language layer
Technical training alone does not make an exportable worker. Roughly a quarter of IT Park export revenue comes from the Asia-Pacific and CIS bloc, and Russian remains the working language across the CIS. Separately, labour migration to Russia is still a major economic channel for Uzbek households, and that route has its own state language exam.
The Prep.uz platform addresses that side of workforce readiness rather than the coding side. It runs a roughly three-month Russian course built for Uzbek speakers, structured around two one-to-one sessions with a personal mentor each week plus two group conversation classes, with a video library and a 1,500-word vocabulary track underneath. The design bet is that scheduled speaking practice, not recorded content, is what moves someone from reading Russian to working in it.
The company is not a venture-backed startup and does not present itself as one, which is a useful reminder that much of this market is built from profitable training businesses rather than funded ones.
What to note
No pricing is published, so evaluation requires a consultation. The site operates entirely in Uzbek. And a course completion certificate is not the state language certificate that Russian work permits require, a distinction anyone budgeting for migration should get straight before enrolling.
4. EduBaza: the ecosystem starts compounding
EduBaza launched in January 2026 as an AI assistant for teachers, generating lesson plans, interactive presentations and classroom materials. In February 2026 it raised $50,000 at a $1 million valuation.
The investor is the signal here. The round came from Temurbek Adhamov, founder of the Najot Ta’lim projects, acting as angel and strategic adviser. When operators from the first wave of a local sector start funding the second wave, the ecosystem has stopped depending entirely on outside capital. That transition is usually a better indicator of durability than any single funding number.
5. Lerna.uz: the aggregation layer
Lerna.uz is a marketplace rather than a school, listing 793 courses across programming, AI, data science, design, management, marketing, finance and more. Its existence is itself a market signal: aggregators appear when buyers face too much choice to evaluate directly.
It is also where you can see the competitive pressure most clearly, because it distributes foreign platforms alongside local ones.
6. The foreign platforms moving in
Lerna lists Skillbox, GeekBrains, SkillFactory, SF Education and Digital Skills Academy among its featured partners, with a further seven schools beyond those. These are large Russian-language edtech businesses, and their catalogues are deeper and better produced than anything local.
Their weakness is the same one Mohirdev exploited. They teach in Russian. For students schooled in Uzbek, that adds a comprehension cost to every hour of study, which is precisely the gap the domestic players were built around.
How that resolves is the central competitive question in Uzbek edtech over the next two years: whether production quality or language fit matters more to the median student.
What this means if you are watching the region
Three things stand out.
The sector is capital-light and revenue-funded. A $350,000 pre-seed is the largest round named here. These businesses were built on tuition, not venture money, which makes them slower to scale and considerably harder to kill.
Language is infrastructure, not a soft skill. It shows up in a coding school’s discount structure, in a platform’s decision to teach in Uzbek, and in a separate training market for Russian. Any assessment of workforce readiness in Central Asia that skips it will misread the market.
And the state programme is doing what it was designed to do. IT Park created enough demand for skilled labour that a private training sector formed around it without being directed to. That sequence, public programme first and private supply second, is the part other emerging markets will want to study.
