Gazeta, in partnership with IT Park Uzbekistan, has launched a series of interviews featuring female startup founders across various regions of the country. The inaugural interviewee is Maftuna Karimova, an Andijan-native and founder of the Femmy application. She provided detailed insights into how her personal motherhood experience inspired the startup idea, the severe challenges encountered while seeking investment, and the cultural significance of offering women's health education in the Uzbek language.
Born in 2002, Karimova began teaching herself programming during her school years and later balanced remote work for Tashkent-based tech firms with her university studies. The concept for Femmy, a reproductive health tracking and community platform, emerged during her pregnancy when she identified a substantial information gap and cultural barriers regarding maternal care in local languages. Juggling a newborn infant and development meetings, she managed to assemble a dedicated team of engineers to build the initial version of the platform.
The journey, however, was fraught with institutional and financial skepticism. Karimova allegedly faced discouragement from potential backers who claimed the global market was already saturated with similar solutions. Despite these setbacks, the project gained critical momentum after placing third at the ICT WEEK Clash of Startups competition and subsequently securing the first-place grant in the social category at the President Tech Award, backed by IT Park Uzbekistan, totaling 100,000 US dollars.
Fulfilling the rigorous KPIs and milestone-based disbursements set by program experts proved to be an exhausting test for the nascent team. Currently, Femmy boasts over 100,000 active users across more than twenty countries, with content vetted in cooperation with the Ministry of Health to align with regional sensitivities. Nevertheless, the founder points out that establishing a sustainable subscription model within a nascent domestic market remains a persistent economic hurdle for the enterprise.
Source: www.gazeta.uz