Silk Road Startup

About Silkroad startup

“Silk Road Startup” is the first and biggest international startup event in Iran. The event aims to gather local and international entrepreneurs, startups, investors, financial institutes, VCs together each year. Silk Road Startup consists of three main stages:

Road Trip: This is when Silk Road Startup Road Trip happens. Each year we break down the country into different regions consisting of a couple of provinces. To select the best startups in each region, we organize local pitch competition events. We travel with our foreign and local jury members to these regions to hear the startups pitching in English.
Silk Road 100: After selecting the best startups in each region, Silk Road 100, the online acceleration program kicks off. In the program, we bring in the local and international entrepreneurs and experts to mentor our startups for a three-month period.
Silk Road Startup Summit: This is our main event. The summit consists of pitch competition between the best-selected startups, keynotes, panels and networking which all happens in English.

Latest Updates

Silk Road Startup summit finished its second year event (Click to see the images)
Fanasa, 3sootjobs, honily startups respectively won the first, second and third place in Silk Road Startup pitch competition 2019 competition.

Second Road Trip

It’s all about the journey when it comes to making dreams come true and trying to make everyone’s life better. What matters the most is human interaction and experience and that’s what we care about. So we drive across the country to meet amazing entrepreneurs and get to know them and their dream.
So we chose top 8 startups from all over the country, mentored them and they will represent their business at the upcoming final event.

Road Trip

explore road trip

SUMMIT

We shortlisted the top startups who pitched during our road trip in 5 cities of the country. After these series of pitch competitions, 8 finalists were accepted to participate at the finals in Tehran. We are going to handpick a curated group of bright speakers, entrepreneurs, investors and executives together for a two-day conference

Panels
Keynotes
Competitions
Networking

SUMMIT

Silk Road 100

Startup Challenge

Includes a launch of a call for entry for all startups across Iran to select the top 100 startups. We launched this competition in September 2017 and out of 400 applications, 84 of them had enough level to be part of the top 100 startups who were selected to pitch during our road trip. We chose 16 starts as finalists to be able to pitch during the road trip.

Mentoring

A 100 day dedicated program for the finalists who will be pitching at the Silk Road Startup Summit in Kish. It includes the 1:1 mentoring, Webinars and physical Workshops. The goal is to help these startups get the most out of the Summit, know how to pitch, how to connect to the attendees who are a mix of investors, international experts, potential clients.

Scaling

100 day time-to-scale after the Summit during which we will help our startups with 100 curated contacts who would be potential investors or partners, introduced by our network. The purpose is to maximize startups’ chance to scale by the right connection with our matchmaking efforts.

explore silkroad 100

Speakers

Over 20 Iranian & International speakers will attend the event and share their stories and experiences in keynotes and panels, discussing ideas, challenges and opportunities about startups.