KG Labs Joins Startup Nations and Attends the 2015 Summit in Mexico
On May 6, 2015, KG Labs was accepted into the Startup Nations network. Startup Nations is a global membership organisation for people working on the policy side of startup ecosystems — not investors or founders, but the advisers, analysts, and officials trying to shape the conditions under which new companies form. The network focuses on regulatory and public-sector levers: what rules and programmes, if changed or introduced, would increase the rate at which high-impact startups appear and survive. Members are admitted through an executive committee review rather than open application.
For KG Labs, membership was a way to connect the work being done in Bishkek to a wider network of people asking similar questions in different national contexts. The Kyrgyz ecosystem in 2015 was early: a small number of active startups, no domestic venture capital, and a regulatory environment built for other sectors. The problems — how to lower the cost of company registration, how to enable foreign investment into early-stage technology companies, how to create relevant talent pipelines — were not unique to Kyrgyzstan, and Startup Nations membership opened access to what was being tried elsewhere.
The Mexico City Summit, December 2015
In December 2015, KG Labs Director Emily Youatt traveled to the Startup Nations Summit in Mexico City and Monterrey as Kyrgyzstan’s delegate, with travel funded by INADEM — Mexico’s national entrepreneurship agency. The summit that year brought together delegates from more than eighty countries to discuss local and national policy challenges and case studies. Emily Youatt was the only representative from Central Asia. The post published at the time noted that KG Labs intended to change this in 2016 — to bring more regional voices into the Startup Nations conversation — and that the Mexico trip had opened new connections within the Eurasian region that were expected to develop into cooperation the following year.
Also attending from Kyrgyzstan was Asylbek Abdikarimov, who had won the national stage of The Pitch competition and represented Kyrgyzstan at the Global Pitch Tournament at the summit. Abdikarimov’s project, Salamat.KG, was designed to automate the appointment system for medical centres — a practical digital-services problem in a context where most scheduling still relied on walk-in queues and phone calls.
Startup Nations summits are, by design, a policy forum rather than a demo day or funding event. What happens at them is conversation between people who have tried things — Startup Chile’s early experience was circulating as a reference case in 2015, as were several European policy experiments — and people trying to figure out what to adapt for their own contexts. Kyrgyzstan sending a delegate and a startup founder to the same event, from the same joint platform, was a small but specific demonstration of what KG Labs was trying to build: a bridge between the policy conversation and the practitioner conversation that, in most contexts, happened in separate rooms.
Details
| KG Labs membership date | May 6, 2015 |
| Summit | Startup Nations Summit, Mexico City and Monterrey, December 2015 |
| KG Labs delegate | Emily Youatt (KG Labs Director) |
| Also attending from KG | Asylbek Abdikarimov (Salamat.KG) — Global Pitch Tournament participant |
| Travel funding | INADEM (Instituto Nacional del Emprendedor, Mexico) |
| Regional context | Only Central Asian delegate at SNS 2015 |
| Startup Nations network | Policy-adviser network focused on identifying regulatory and public-sector levers for high-impact entrepreneurship; member admission by executive committee review |
