EDB Digital Initiatives Fund Backs Tech for Eurasian Integration

Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.uz) — While finance ministers of seven states discussed investment horizons at the plenary session of the Annual Meeting of the Eurasian Development Bank (EDB), another story unfolded on the neighboring platform: the quiet but consistent assembly of a common digital space for Eurasia, ranging from river management to school gradebooks, and from traffic lights to oncology diagnostics.

Over several years, the EDB Digital Initiatives Fund has grown into a structure that does not simply finance startups, but purposefully builds cross-country technological infrastructure. Six projects—winners and partners of the fund's annual competition—were presented at the forum simultaneously. Their geography spans Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Russia. Their logic is uniform: digital solutions as the glue of regional integration.

Water, Algorithms, and a Toothbrush Kazakhstan is finalizing the launch of a national information system for water resources, arguably the most large-scale digital project presented at the forum. The system, developed with the support of the EDB, covers more than 17,000 rivers and 4,000 lakes in the country. Every water body is digitized, provided with a passport of characteristics, and integrated into a unified balance sheet accounting.

"Previously, data was collected manually, then transmitted to the ministry. Now, all of this is done in a digital format," explained a representative of the Ministry of Water Resources of Kazakhstan, adding that the system will move from test mode to industrial operation in the coming weeks.

Fifteen modules of the system cover state monitoring, issuance of permits, hydrological modeling based on Dutch methodologies, and irrigation control. For water bodies that inspectors cannot physically reach, radar satellite sensing is applied, and the system itself calculates the water volume.

A separate module tracks which farmers have water-use contracts and whether water is actually flowing to the fields: a green marker indicates a contract exists and water is flowing, a yellow marker means a contract exists but water is not flowing, and a red marker signifies no contract at all. Since the beginning of this year, all agreements with water users have been converted into electronic format.

The ministry representative concluded the speech with an unexpected calculation: if every resident of Kazakhstan turns off the tap while brushing their teeth, the country will annually save 260 cubic kilometers of water, which is a two-year volume of water consumption for Astana.

"We need to change the culture of attitude toward water. This must start with children," he said.

The Invisible Traffic Light Astana has suffered from traffic congestion for years. The company Compass took on the solution with financial support from the EDB Digital Initiatives Fund—and according to the fund's leadership, the product was chosen through an open competition as more effective and less expensive than Western counterparts.

The project creates a transport digital twin of the Kazakh capital—a mathematical model capable of predicting congestion before it arises, calculating the optimal number of lanes for public transport, and assessing the transport load from planned residential complexes or shopping centers.

"It is much cheaper to prevent an accident than to liquidate its consequences. The same is true for a transport collapse," stated Alexey Shupov, the project manager.

He pointed to a problem that technology cannot solve: an acute shortage of qualified transport planners in the region. Parallel to software development, the company opened a department at a university in Almaty.

"Artificial intelligence can help, but to use AI, you need to be a professional in your field. Otherwise, it will lead you the wrong way," Shupov warned.

Based on the project results, the authorities of Astana will receive not only the model but also the software itself as a tool for independent long-term planning.

Supercloud for Startups Without a Budget Astana Hub, the largest innovation cluster in Central Eurasia with more than 2,000 resident companies, presented the AI Supercloud platform—a free environment for artificial intelligence development, which already counts more than 15,000 users and over 550 tools.

The logic of the project is simple: access to GPU clusters and professional AI tools is expensive, which cuts off startups from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and other countries in the region from the market. The platform provides this infrastructure for free.

"The platform is not even six months old, but the demand in Central Eurasia is already huge," reported Gerard Ego, Managing Director of Astana Hub.

At a recent hackathon organized jointly with the EDB, more than 900 applications were received from various countries. The finalists developed more than 100 AI solutions within 48 hours. The winners were invited to an in-person tour of Kazakhstan.

AI Diagnoses, the Doctor Decides The company Third Opinion has been working in the field of medical AI for nine years. Today it is present in eight countries, and its solutions have been used in tens of millions of clinical cases.

At the forum, the company presented a platform for doctors that allows analyzing medical data in minutes instead of hours and forming a preliminary diagnostic protocol before the start of treatment. In parallel, the platform serves as a network for professional communication between doctors from different countries.

The key thesis of the presentation: medical AI is not a replacement for a doctor, but a tool that the doctor must trust. Trust is built through years of clinical trials.

"If a doctor does not find the product useful, they will not use it. Therefore, any solution in this area must first gain the trust of a specific doctor," a company representative said.

The EDB prize became the first recognition for Third Opinion outside of Russia, opening the way to scale into the member countries of the bank. According to the company's estimates, the need for medical education in the EDB states exceeds US$120 million per year.

The Map as an Anti-Corruption Tool For six years, the company G Intellect has been helping entrepreneurs in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan make decisions about business placement based on geospatial data—where previously this was done intuitively or through connections.

Company founder Denis Strukov said that the digital twin of Tashkent, created in 2020, was presented to the president of the country. He spent twenty minutes with the system and made management decisions on urban infrastructure based on it.

Together with the EDB, the company is now implementing a project to scale the model to six capitals of Eurasia—Astana, Tashkent, Dushanbe, Minsk, and others. The concept is the so-called "15-minute city," where residents can assess the accessibility of schools, clinics, and parks from any point on the map.

For small businesses, the system works as a risk reduction tool: overlaying geodata onto a map of the competitive environment allows avoiding mistakes that cost entrepreneurs billions.

"When we see more data, we make more balanced decisions," Strukov summarized succinctly.

Science Seeks Industry The company Inventorus, a winner of the EDB competition, solves a problem that is rarely spoken about aloud: science and industry in the CIS countries live in parallel universes and do not know how to find each other.

The platform aggregates over 300 million scientific publications and patent documents from 20 patent offices around the world, automatically forms technological profiles of researchers, and allows enterprises to find the necessary experts in hours instead of months.

The platform's AI tools reduced the preparation of a patent landscape from one month to one or two working days. The cost of similar work performed manually ranges from 50,000 to 300,000 rubles, depending on the qualification of the performer.

Currently, Inventorus works with Rosatom, Roscosmos, and is present in 380 Russian universities after being included in the national subscription by personal instruction of the country's president. Winning the EDB competition became the first step for the company to expand into Belarus and other member states of the bank.

The School Gradebook as a Foundation of Trust The session concluded with perhaps the most unexpected project in terms of concept: a digital educational platform for Tajikistan, covering all levels from kindergarten to the ministry.

The system allows tracking the performance of each student in real time, building individual educational paths, and transmitting objective data to all levels of management without delay. It features three interface languages: Tajik, Russian, and English. The architecture is open for localization to any country.

Alexander Fedorov, who presented the project, drew an unexpected conclusion, bridging back to the morning transport session.

"At that session, participants said that the main obstacle in logistics between countries is trust in each other. Trust cannot be digitized. But it is formed in childhood—when children do joint projects, when teachers communicate across borders, when parents from different countries speak on the same platform," he said.

The company has 25 years of experience in Russia, where its systems are used by 37 million people in 33 regions.

The EDB as an Incubator for Regional Scaling The running theme of the session was not the technology itself, but the mechanism of its distribution. The EDB digital initiatives competition essentially works as a venture selection with a regional mandate: winners receive not only a prize but also financing, access to the network of the bank's member countries, and support in adapting the product to the requirements of state customers.

"The Digital Initiatives Fund is ready to help in scaling these solutions to other countries," the session moderator stated, addressing shareholder countries with a call to study the Kazakh experience in water resource management.

As the EDB enters its new strategic cycle of 2027–2031, the digital agenda will apparently occupy an increasingly significant place in it—not as a separate direction, but as a cross-cutting tool for everything from roads to hospitals.