Garage48 Bishkek: Kyrgyzstan’s First 48-Hour Startup Sprint

From September 11 to 13, 2015, the new campus of the American University of Central Asia on Aaly Tokombaev Street hosted something Bishkek had not seen before: a 54-hour nonstop startup marathon where roughly a hundred participants arrived on a Friday evening with ideas and left on Sunday with working prototypes. Garage48 — the Estonian-origin hackathon franchise that had already run events across Northern Europe and Africa — came to Kyrgyzstan through KG Labs, its local organizing partner.

The mentor delegation flew in from Tallinn as part of what Estonia’s tech community half-jokingly calls the #estonianmafia — the dense network of founders and operators that has carried Estonian startups onto international markets. Leading the delegation was Ragnar Sass, co-founder of Pipedrive, the B2B CRM company that had by then raised $13.5 million from Bessemer Venture Partners and AngelPad and won the 2015 Europas European Tech Startup Awards. He was joined by Jüri Kaljundi, co-founder of Garage48 and Weekdone, alongside Elise Sass, Helen Kokk, Andres Susi, and Sven Kirsimäe — a mentor and jury bench drawn directly from the working core of Estonia’s startup scene. Garage48’s main organizer for the Bishkek edition was Maarika Truu. From the KG Labs side, co-founder Emily C. Youatt and managing partner Aziz Soltobaev co-hosted the weekend.

How the Bishkek Edition Came About

The path to Bishkek had begun more than a year earlier, in Marrakesh. At the 2014 Global Entrepreneurship Congress, Aziz Soltobaev met Martin Rand, an Estonian entrepreneur and member of the Garage48 team. The conversation in Morocco led to a follow-up exchange and, eventually, to introductions across the wider Garage48 network — the point at which the idea of running the format in Kyrgyzstan became something concrete to plan around.

Before committing to host the event in Bishkek, Soltobaev travelled to Kyiv in the spring of 2015 to attend a Garage48 weekend there as a participant. The aim was specific: to watch the methodology run end to end — how teams formed, how mentors moved, how the room held its energy across 54 hours — and to take back a working understanding of what it would take to replicate the format faithfully in Kyrgyzstan. The September event at AUCA was the result of that preparation.

How Garage48 Works

The format is deliberately compressed. On the first evening, participants pitch thirty to forty ideas in front of the room. Each idea goes on the wall. Everyone votes with their feet — walking over to whichever idea they want to build. In Bishkek, eighteen teams formed this way on Friday evening, mixing developers, designers, project managers, and marketers who often had not met before. From that point, the clock ran straight through to Sunday evening, when seventeen of those teams presented finished projects to the jury.

Garage48 is explicitly not a developer-only event. The Estonian organizers’ framing — echoed in the KG Labs invitation that went out to local IT companies — was that a successful weekend team needs project managers, marketers, and product people alongside the engineers. Mentors circulated between teams over the 54 hours, giving technical, product, and business feedback. Reflecting on the weekend afterwards, Aziz Soltobaev told the AUCA news desk: “Our expectations were met by 100%. The most important thing that we have changed is the understanding of what a startup is, the role of related roles in the team, and the value of teamwork.”

The event ran in English, consistent with Garage48’s international format. The hashtag #Garage48kglabs documented the weekend on social media.

The Microsoft Delegation

Alongside the Estonian mentors, a delegation from Microsoft attended the hackathon — not as sponsors of a prize alone, but as scouts. The visit had a specific purpose: Microsoft was assessing whether the Bishkek ecosystem warranted opening a Microsoft Innovation Center in the city. The decision would be informed by what they observed over the weekend — the quality of the teams, the seriousness of the work, and the depth of the local technical and entrepreneurial community. For participants, this meant the room contained not only mentors and a jury but also the people who would decide whether one of the world’s largest technology companies set up a permanent training presence in Bishkek.

Winners

The grand prize went to Segmently, a tool that helps site owners display the right marketing campaign to the right audience. The two-person team received a trip to Estonia plus tickets to the Slush conference in Helsinki — Northern Europe’s largest gathering of technology entrepreneurs — sponsored by Eclipse Food Group. Five further category awards were given out:

Award	Team
Grand Prize (trip to Estonia + Slush Helsinki, sponsored by Eclipse Food Group)	Segmently
Microsoft Prize	Infodigg
Most International Impact	Sportik
Social Potential Prize	My City
Technically Strong Project	Look Media
Audience Favorite	Charity Shop

Microsoft also distributed four Lumia 1320 phones to teams building on Microsoft platforms. The remaining teams — Kake.io, Esal, MiniAcc, The Moon, The Trip, Easy Polling Test, Lost and Found, Educator / University Guide, Challenge.me, Kandai, Sonic+, and Let’s Talk — completed their prototypes and presented over the weekend without category prizes.

Cost and What Was Provided

The participation fee was set at $15 per person for the full 54 hours. The figure did not cover even a tenth of what the weekend cost to run; KG Labs set it deliberately low, but not at zero, to filter for commitment rather than curiosity. In return, participants received unlimited coffee and snacks from Sierra Coffee, three meals a day, unlimited Wi-Fi, and access to AUCA’s new campus as a working space for the duration. The space itself, which had only recently opened, was part of what made the event possible at the scale it operated.

Why Garage48 in Bishkek

Garage48 had started in Estonia in April 2010. By the time it reached Bishkek, it had already produced companies covered by international tech press and was a recognized fixture of the Estonian and Northern European startup calendars. Estonia’s trajectory — from post-Soviet economy to digital governance pioneer — had made its startup culture particularly interesting to Central Asian observers. Having Pipedrive’s co-founder, Garage48’s own co-founder, and other Estonian operators arrive in Bishkek carried a weight that was not lost on participants: the people in the room were the ones whose companies the local ecosystem had been reading about.

For KG Labs, this was the first event run on the intensive nonstop format that would define its subsequent hackathons. The Garage48 template established what that kind of event could feel like in Bishkek: compressed, high-energy, oriented toward producing something real, and connected — through mentors, prizes, and observers like Microsoft — to networks well beyond the city.

The full event was recorded; the HD video is on the KG Labs YouTube channel. Garage48’s own coverage is split across three posts: the event page, the recap blog, and a profile of the winning team Segmently. AUCA’s own news desk covered the weekend with the full list of category awards.

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