ABACA Opens: The Business Angels Association of Central Asia, June 2022
On June 23, 2022, the Association of Business Angels of Central Asia — ABACA — held its first official event at OloloErkindik in Bishkek. The opening took the form of a Demo Day: a public launch gathering with the founding board, invited investors, and the first cohort of startups presenting to an angel audience. It was the culmination of a process that had begun, in its earliest documented form, in 2014 — when KG Labs started making the case in ecosystem presentations that angel investment infrastructure was the missing layer in the Kyrgyz startup ecosystem, without which institutional investment could not follow.
The Argument That Had Been Building Since 2014
The logic of angel investment as infrastructure — rather than just a financial instrument — runs through KG Labs’ ecosystem work across eight years. The argument is straightforward when stated: early-stage capital from individual investors is what transforms a prototype into a company worth institutional attention. Without it, startups hit a gap between what grant programmes and competition prizes can fund and what venture capital firms require before they invest. In a market like Kyrgyzstan, where domestic venture capital did not exist and foreign funds faced high due-diligence costs for small ticket sizes, that gap was structural. Angel investors — typically experienced entrepreneurs or executives investing their own capital — could bridge it, and doing so collectively through an association would allow them to syndicate deals, share diligence, and build the track record that would eventually attract larger capital into the market.
This rationale was elaborated in KG Labs presentations from 2014 onward and was part of the strategic framework that KG Labs board members developed together. The conclusion it pointed toward — that Kyrgyzstan needed a structured angel network before it could have a functional venture ecosystem — was what ABACA was built to act on.
Founding Structure
ABACA was co-founded by Aziz Soltobaev and Rinat Abdrasilov, who serves as chairman. Both were already connected through the KG Labs ecosystem: Abdrasilov had been an independent director on the KG Labs board and had been involved in the FinTech events series in 2018–2019. The founding board also included Elvira Maratova, Daniyar Amanaliev — who had participated in the Creative Business Cup 2018 panel discussions — and Edil Azhibaev as independent directors, with Sabina Abbasova as executive director.
The association was registered as a public foundation and is based at OloloErkindik — the same Bishkek creative-technology space that has hosted KG Labs events since the early years of the ecosystem. The mission statement positions ABACA as “the voice of the early investment industry in startups”: a body that represents angel investors to legislators and regulators, develops and promotes best practices in early-stage investing, and builds the platforms — events, networks, shared information — through which investors and entrepreneurs find each other.
From Executive Director Search to Demo Day
The pre-launch phase ran through late 2021 and early 2022. In September 2021, ABACA published a call for an executive director to lead the launch. In April 2022, the association ran its first public programme activity — a “Feel Like an Investor” interactive game co-organised with John Galt and the GIST Innovation Hubs — as a way to introduce angel investment concepts to an audience that had not encountered them in a structured form before. The June 2022 Demo Day was the first fully public-facing event as a functioning association.
The Central Asian scope in the name was intentional. Kyrgyzstan’s ecosystem had been building relationships with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and beyond through KG Labs’ Startup Nations work and regional ecosystem connections since 2015. An angel association that operated at the regional level rather than the national one was both more credible to international co-investors and more useful to startups that were already thinking across borders.
Organisation Details
| Full name | Association of Business Angels of Central Asia (ОФ “Ассоциация Бизнес Ангелов Центральной Азии”) |
| Abbreviation | ABACA |
| First official event | June 23, 2022 — Demo Day opening, OloloErkindik, Bishkek |
| Co-founders | Aziz Soltobaev; Rinat Abdrasilov (Chairman) |
| Board | Elvira Maratova; Daniyar Amanaliev (Independent Director); Edil Azhibaev (Independent Director); Sabina Abbasova (Executive Director) |
| Location | OloloErkindik, Erkindik Boulevard 64b, Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic |
| Mission | The voice of the early investment industry in startups — unifying angel investors, representing to legislators and regulators, developing best practices, building platforms for investor–entrepreneur dialogue |
| Strategic context | Angel network as prerequisite for institutional investment and venture capital; concept developed through KG Labs ecosystem work from 2014 |
| Website | abaca.pro |
