At 21, two best friends from Kyrgyzstan raised nearly $1 million in weeks from top Silicon Valley investors

Meet Zuhayr Abdullazhanov and Nurtilek Raimzhanov, the founders of Siml — an AI platform that helps run online stores. In our interview, they share how they went from building side projects in Kyrgyzstan to raising their first million in Silicon Valley, why they left university to go all in on their startup, and their ambition to build the largest tech company ever created by founders from Central Asia.

Zuhayr Abdullazhanov, San Francisco city, CEO & Founder, LinkedIn

Nurtilek Raimzhanov, San Francisco, COO & Founder, LinkedIn

How it all started

We are Zuhayr Abdullazhanov and Nurtilek Raimzhanov, two best friends from high school. We were born in Kyrgyzstan, came to the United States as students, and have known each other for more than 10 years.

Over the years, we built many side projects together. We started by selling hand sanitizers online during COVID-19, then built scrapers, AI tools, and a personal finance app for college students. For a long time, we were fascinated by opportunities on the internet and by how quickly people’s lives were changing and becoming more dependent on it.

While I was studying at MIT and researching data from online marketplaces, I noticed something interesting. AI agents were becoming capable of performing sales related tasks, working with enormous amounts of data, and completing work that would normally take people hours.

At the same time, many things in ecommerce had not changed for years. Brands and sellers were still struggling to run their stores, especially when it came to advertising. They had to manage different tools, agencies, contractors, customer support, content, shipping, products, and dozens of workflows that were still mostly manual.

That is how we came up with Siml, the AI that runs your store.

Launching Siml

If Shopify is the storefront for sellers, Siml is the operating system behind it. Siml connects to a store, understands its data, and uses AI agents to manage the work required to operate and grow it.

Our core vision is to allow anyone, from a person starting their first store to a large enterprise brand, to sell online and turn their store into an AI seller. We imagine a future where stores do not just use AI tools. The stores themselves are operated by AI.

One thing Siml does especially well is advertising. Advertising looks simple from the outside, but it is one of the hardest problems in ecommerce. Brands have to constantly create new content, analyze performance, test ideas, understand customers, manage budgets, and react when something changes. We are building AI agents that can manage these workflows and complete in minutes work that would normally take a human team hours.

Target audience

Today, Siml is built for any seller who wants to sell online.

If you have an idea, you can use Siml to start selling. If you are a small business, Siml connects to your store and manages the workflows happening behind it. If you are an enterprise brand with an existing team, Siml can help with advertising, automation, and customized solutions.

Siml already has more than 100 stores and brands running on it, even though we are still a very young company.

The future will be very different from what most people imagine. Today, people already use AI assistants to search for products and decide what to buy. In the next few years, AI agents will shop on behalf of people, compare products, make decisions, and complete purchases.

On the other side, sellers will also be represented by AI agents. These agents will operate stores, communicate with customers, manage advertising, and complete sales. We believe Siml can become the best store operator in the world and the infrastructure powering this new way of selling.

Accelerators and Silicon Valley

I remember calling Nurtilek in May and telling him, “Bro, we need to move to San Francisco and go all in on Siml.”

For context, Nurtilek is one of the most thoughtful operators I know, and he has deep knowledge of logistics and company operations. We had worked together for years, and I knew there was nobody else with whom I would rather build this company.

At the time, we had opportunities from Amazon and Shopify to work as software engineers. Those were safe options, but we knew that if we wanted to succeed, we had to fully commit and risk many things. We both left our university programs to focus on the company. I left MIT, and Nurtilek also left his program.

We moved to San Francisco and joined Powell Street, one of the most exciting hacker houses in the world. In the previous year alone, people from the house built eight Y Combinator companies, two a16z backed companies, and many other strong startups.

Living there was a great experience because we were constantly surrounded by people building and shipping products. In San Francisco, you can meet the founder of a major technology company outside your house, play football with billionaires, or randomly see them at the gym. This concentration of technology, talent, and ambition is why so many founders choose to build there.

Raising first investment

We cold emailed Cory Levy, the founder of Z Fellows. For those who do not know Z Fellows, it originally started as a $10 000 fellowship for young founders, but it grew into one of the strongest communities for Gen Z talent in Silicon Valley.

Cory is known for finding talented young founders very early. Nine companies backed through the Z Fellows community have already become unicorns, and many Z Fellows later became Thiel Fellows and raised from major institutional funds.

We had a call with Cory, and shortly afterward the deal was done. Cory invested in Siml and later introduced us to Collective Global, which also invested in the company.

Within weeks, we raised nearly $1 million, and our latest valuation reached $20 million. All of this happened before our twenty first birthdays. Now we are both 21, and I still joke about how quickly everything happened.

We also became the first Central Asian founders to join Z Fellows and receive this kind of backing from the community. Our network of mentors includes founders behind companies such as Eventbrite, DoorDash, Anduril, Netflix, Etched, and OpenAI, along with people like Sam Altman.

Having people like this believe in us means a lot. It is not only about raising money. It is about receiving support from people who have already built some of the most important companies in the world.

Challenges

Building the product is only one part of the journey. One of the hardest things is actually scaling the company. 

People often read that someone raised $500 000 or $1 million and think that person has already made it. In reality, raising money is only the beginning. The real pressure starts when you have to build the product, grow beyond the first customers, hire the right people, and prove that the company can become something much bigger.

We are still a small team, and our goal is to build an autonomous company. With AI, we believe a small number of highly capable people can build something that previously required hundreds or thousands of employees.

We do not like giving too much advice because everyone has a different life and a different path. But being in the right place and surrounded by the right people matters a lot. It is also important to find something you are genuinely passionate about because building a company becomes extremely difficult when the initial excitement disappears.

Plans

Our goal is for millions of sellers and stores to use Siml so they can operate in the fastest and simplest way possible. For now, we are keeping the team small, building from San Francisco, and focusing on scaling.

We want Siml to become one of the largest technology companies in the world and the largest company ever built by founders from Central Asia.

We are only getting started.