Fikr Ventures at Baku ID 2026

Fikr Ventures is at Baku ID 2026 in Baku, Azerbaijan, on 17–18 September. The fund is represented by Ahmad S Abdo, GP and Head of our Investment Committee, and Abdulhameed Al-Habahbeh, Technical Due Diligence Lead.

Baku ID is one of the largest annual startup and innovation festivals in the Caucasus and Central Asia, bringing founders together with investors from Emerging Europe, Türkiye and MENA. Across its 2022–25 editions the festival has drawn more than 13,500 participants and 375 startups.

This year it moves to SABAH.city, which opens during the festival: a 20-hectare innovation district ten minutes from the centre of Baku, built in partnership with Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Science and Education and hosted by SABAH.HUB. Its strategic partners include the Ministry of Economy, SOCAR and PASHA Holding.

That partnership is the reason we are going. An education ministry opening a technology freezone is not a common arrangement, and it sits directly on the question we spend our time on: what a country has to build between the infrastructure it installs and the workforce that will use it.

The programme opens with a session on identifying skills priorities through public–private cooperation, and the investment panel names MENA explicitly alongside the Caucasus, Central Asia and Türkiye. Among the speakers is Kwame Yamgnane, a co-founder of 42 — the coding school built without teachers, textbooks or diplomas — now chief executive of Qwasar.

Founders attending can still register at bakuid.com. If you are building in education technology anywhere across the region, we would like to meet you there.