On 15th August, the world watched as the Taliban took control of Afghanistan by capturing its capital Kabul. This took place after US forces withdrew their troops from the country after a deal with the Taliban to end their two-decade-long war. Taliban is a fundamentalist Islamic force that has been fighting and taking over parts of the country over a few years. The current conflict has led to the death and displacement of millions of Afghani people.
Before the recent takeover, Afghanistan had slowly started to open its door towards modernization and many small business and startups were starting to rise. With Google launching its startup grind program in Afghanistan in 2016, the country saw a few startups and ventures coming up and support the success of entrepreneurs and their businesses.
Currently, Afghanistan is in crisis, as the country’s small business economy has been dealt with yet another series of devastating blows by the Taliban. And many of the startups that have started to provide technology services and products and small businesses are facing numerous problems and are even closing down. Many banks, ATMs, media centres, Government offices, Passport & Visa offices, Schools, colleges, universities and many other workplaces are being shut down by the Taliban.
The military organizations emerged during the civil war in the southwest and border regions of Pakistan. Taliban had held power in most parts of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001 and had also imposed the strict interpretation of the Sharia Law or Islamic law back then. Taliban started out by saying that they had vowed in fighting corruption and improving security, but in reality, the Taliban is an extremist group that follows the austere form of Islam.
Taliban is an extremist group that earns its money from various illegal ways. Some of the ways it earns its money are by taxing and drug trade which has to lead to the country becoming the world’s largest producer of opium, which can be refined to make heroin. Besides taxing and drug trade, the organization is also illegally mine the precious minerals of the country. While the mining industry in Afghanistan is said to bring in over $1 billion every year.
Now with the Taliban taking over the entire country just in the matter of a few days, we see the history repeating. With the Taliban in power, the women of the country face the greatest threat as they will lose their basic human rights like the freedom to work, to dress as they want, or to leave home alone under Taliban rule. Not only that the country has possibilities of turning into yet another training ground for terrorism. While many business and startups are losing their employees and are close to shutting down.
Over the past few years, the country has seen a steady increase in the growth of IT startups that had also started to expand into other sectors. Before we check on how the current situation can affect the startups in the country, these are some of these top Afghani startups are:
SmartMaktab
Smartmaktab logo
SmartMaktabcis a startup that was started by Naikbeen Naikpay in order to create a better educational system for students. This Afghani startup is revolutionizing the way that instructors present school subjects ranging from mathematics to English, by creating an app and digitizing education for more than 10 million students across the country.
Daftar
Daftar logo
Daftar is one of the most well-known co-working spaces in Afghanistan with its headquarters based in Kabul. Daftar helps other small startups and businesses by renting out desks monthly and by providing them with multimedia rooms to assist with business marketing operations.
Netlinks
Netlinks logo
Netlinks is one of the first successful IT startups in Afghanistan founded by Farshid Ghyasi. The company’s employees were said to be trained in Indian and now the company is capable of providing customized IT solutions to over 3,000 clients.
Ibtikaar
Ibtikaar is a startup incubation program that helps entrepreneurs by mentoring, training their skills and getting funding. So far the company has supported and helped many startups grow across Afghanistan.
Aria Gems
Aria Gems logo
This company was started in 2013 and is known to play a vital role in cutting down the illegal and black market trade in the country. The company aims to prevent emeralds from getting sold through illegal ways and by ensuring miners receive a fair price for their gems.
TechSharks is one of the top startups in Afghanistan and was founded in 2011. The company offers services from web hosting services to mobile app creation, among others. The company is also helping Afghanis to come up with innovative ideas that will help the IT industry grow in their country.
Farah Farhat Faizi
Farah Farhat Faizi is a fruit and vegetable processing company was founded in 2012 by Kobra Dastagirzada. The company helps promotes domestic products of Afghanistan and was also a part of the Google initiative of Afghanistan’s Start-Up Grind.
Bushra Tranum
This is a food company that was started by another woman named Zarifa Razaee in 2019. The company produces and sells organic food products.
Gahwara
Gahwara is a unique startup that was started by Shabeer Ahmad Hameed in 2018. The company started an artistic kindergarten for kids where they can learn are music, dancing, painting, and handicrafts along with the Preliminary Body Practices, Yoga, Technology, and Management.
ToNext
ToNext was started by Akmal Arzhang in 2017 and is a firm that provides many cost-effective IT solutions and services.
What is the future of these startups in Afghanistan?
After the Western-backed Afghanistan Government fell after 20 years and the Afghani President Ashraf Ghani fled the country. Many Afghanis started to fear for their future and started running to the airport which was one of the last ways to get out of the country. The Afghanis are now struggling to get out of the country in any way possible, in order to find a better future in other countries.
Employees of these startups leaving their jobs and leaving the country. The women will now have to stay in their house or wear a full burqa and be accompanied by a male relative if they want to go out, which has led to many women already losing out on education or jobs. Many businesses that were run by women or had women as employees will be shut down.
Besides, that businesses and startups will no longer get support from the government. While the electricity and internet access, education gap in the society and poor economic conditions will only grow and this will harm the upcoming startup ecosystem in Afghanistan. There is also a potential that the illegal activities will increase in the country because the Taliban and might become a training ground for terrorist groups like Al Qaeda.
The top startups in Afghanistan are SmartMaktab, ToNext, Gahwara, Bushra Tranum, Farah Farhat Faizi, TechSharks, Aria Gems, Ibtikaar, Netlinks, Daftar, among others.
Who are the Taliban?
The Taliban is a military organization that emerged during the civil war in the southwest and border regions of Pakistan.
What happened to Afghanistan on 15th August 2020?
On 15th August, the Taliban took control of Afghanistan by capturing its capital Kabul.
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While the world was still stuck to the smartphone revolution, there was this founder who had the vision to revolutionize the way people and businesses train, learn and perform with superior technologies like AR, VR, etc to significantly enhance knowledge and improve the quality of life. We’re talking about none other than Vijay Karunakaran who launched InGage technologies in 2012.
TNQ InGage offers construction-based services to overcome workforce training challenges, to improve performances, creating a safe work culture, and closing the experience gap – all while reducing cost and risk. The TNQ InGage services are meant for all core sectors such as Buildings & Factories, Oil & Gas, Transmission & Distribution, Heavy Civil, and Highway Engineering. The modules it provides include Site Equipment Erection Techniques & Inspection, Fire & Excavation Safety, Heavy Vehicle Management, Power Tools Training & Operation, and a whole host of others. The Augmented Reality Field services here include the provision of digital manuals – which helps the field crew to assess real-time task-based information, and Inspection & Design Reviews – where it uses HoloLens to deliver remote inspections and design review by enabling 3D views over a building.
In the manufacturing sector, TNQ InGage training helps reduce risk and accelerate implementation during the laying of complex automated facilities, and benefits configuration, safety, and workplace ergonomics. Performance training is provided in terms of product training, disassembly and maintenance training, etc. The AR Field Services in the manufacturing sector caters to Repair & Maintenance – where technicians are allowed to work hands-free and faster, with each step in a troubleshooting or repair process displayed in their field of view; Expert assistance – through AR solutions that provide remote experts with virtual views, with which they can monitor and provide instant feedback; and Quality Control – through solutions that guide operators to perform inspection tasks and identify parts that are missing or incorrectly assembled.
In the healthcare sector, custom immersive solutions are capable of enhancing the proficiency of the trainees. TNQ InGage builds realistic training simulators integrated with force-feedback technology and motion tracking so that professionals could train with real medical procedures before facing the patient. It’s customized modules here include Medical & Healthcare Training, Patient Experience, Physician Empathy, Vision Care Assessment, Rehabilitation, and more.
And its Digital Experience Centres, as already observed, is a place that encourages collaboration and has proven to be a valuable resource for company-wide workshops and employee onboarding.
TNQ Technologies is a 21-year-old company that focuses on content technologies and products, with a strength of 2,500 employees in its ranks. “They’ve joined hands with us on the firm belief that the future of content consumption lies in leveraging AR and VR environments and have made this investment with TNQ InGage as a part of their long-term strategy.” Said Vijay. Its extensive work over the last seven years and the strong relationships with prestigious customers and partners furthered the company’s interest in forming this Joint Venture.
On the other side, Ingage is looking at TNQ Technologies as a long-term strategic partner that would help them with growth and scalability. As stated earlier, they are investing in R&D to improve human interaction with virtual objects, with the object of developing projects and services that will have a socially meaningful impact on how people train, work and live. They are also looking to penetrate the global market, which includes the world of book-publishing by leveraging TNQ’s existing capabilities and competencies.
TNQ Ingage Team
TNQ Technologies would be involved in the following roles as a part of this Joint Venture:
Supporting growth and scalability by introducing process, best practices, and bandwidth.
Providing essential HR and Software support for sustaining rapid and significant growth.
Providing financial support to make investments in people, technology, and products.
Providing strategic investments with a long-term strategy.
Promoting AR to book publishing by leveraging our contacts and capabilities.
Leveraging its reach in the Indian market to support sales.
Leveraging the existing global marketing capabilities through sales personnel across Europe.
InGage’s role in this partnership is to provide meaningful technical solutions with a human touch. In this new and most exciting phase, they emphasize their commitment to providing customers with a more enriching and productive experience through our Immersive Technology portfolios. The Ingage team believes that this partnership will help us in our pursuit of developing their range of AR/VR products by embedding HCI (Human-Computer Interface), through which the objects in our environment can interact with each other, as well as with humans. And they are also looking to penetrate the global market, which includes the world of book-publishing by leveraging TNQ’s existing capabilities and competencies.
The entire team of TNQ InGage live, breathe, talk, walk immersive Computing. The team of storyboard artists, 3D engineers, animators, and lighting artists bring the creative half to the table, while the unity and unreal developers, algorithm developers, hardware specialists, Android and IOS developers, and program managers get their heads down and build solid experiences for clients. This venture hires people who are ceaselessly driven towards the pursuit of excellence and they are currently a team of 50 plus people.
TNQ InGage – What problems does TNQ InGage solve?
Its services involve empathy, which makes this venture build life-like experiences in a virtual world. VR taps into the power of tech and creative storytelling to make learning immersive, retainable, explorable, and seamless. It is a truly immersive and tactile medium that engages all senses to imprint training sessions on memory, which results in higher retention and absorption rates. Its main USP lies in upskilling, as 50% of global business leaders identify skill shortage as a key workforce challenge.
The training mode significantly reduces the time, cost, and risk spent on traditional training sessions; statistics suggest that VR Based Training improves learning quality and retention rates by 76%.
The virtual environment empowers people to practice experiences that would mean a lot of risk in a physical setting. It is a platform for technicians and engineers to explore, investigate, and learn to navigate scenarios that would be a part of their working lives. The TNQ InGage team’s expertise, which has helped complete more than 500 projects with many Fortune 500 Companies, is continuously working towards creating compelling experiences. Also, their design-centric VR development flow drives experiences across all Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs). The feedback mechanism would track the performance of people so that they can rectify their portions of error.
The AR Based Services allow engineers in the construction and manufacturing industry to use AR glass or a smartphone to get virtual step-by-step live instructions while performing machine repair and other maintenance tasks. The integration with IoT leads to faster performance of machines, embedding sensors and intelligence that can monitor and generate data so that timely action can be taken to prevent any instances of downtime. AR Healthcare Solutions enable surgeons to perform complicated procedures better, by rendering 3D reconstructions of the body part. TNQ InGage converges IoT and AR to transform industrial maintenance and field services by real-time capturing of data and conversion of the same into recommendations. This leads to faster and efficient identification of errors, with scope for speedy remedial.
Ideally, TNQ InGage conceptualizes, designs, and delivers Digital Experience Centers that provide a hands-on, experiential space for customers, employees, and trainees to collaborate with technologies such as AR, VR, MR, AI, IoT, Robotics, and other techniques. It is specifically designed for performing thoughtful, transformative digital initiatives in a space that encourages innovation and engagement. These Centres have proven to be a valuable resource for company-wide workshops and employee onboarding.
TNQ InGage’s technology-based solutions are specifically meant for enterprises because it believes that to make the world better, one needs to make it smarter. “We don’t believe in tech for tech’s sake, but in tech for humanity’s sake. Since our inception, we have been continuously observing, developing, and testing production techniques and optimized hardware solutions. Our passion for this technology means that we will continue to learn from any future advancements as the technology is moving towards mainstream adoption. Our higher level of consumer focus helps us deliver projects with compelling content.” Says the founder
TNQ InGage also has creative technologists who blend creativity and technology to create compelling experiences. Its Bespoke range of solutions serves the purpose of analyzing requirements and caters to other purposes like Architecture and Interior Design, procurement and deployment of the appropriate hardware, as well as the development and deployment of content. Apart from this, the team works with strong expertise that has helped them complete more than 500 projects in a short span of years, a cross-platform technology that can be deployed across all AR & VR devices, and an intelligent feedback mechanism. Last but not least, TNQ InGage solutions are cost-effective.
TNQ Ingage – Target Market Size
Industrial investments of AR/VR are exceeding the expectations. It is envisaged to triple its size in the years to come. To say that we are in a digital age is an understatement, post-digital may be an appropriate term. This is because the technology of today is getting more and more intuitive that it would change the way we learn and conduct our endeavors.
The global market of AR/VR was estimated at USD 18.4 billion in 2018, which is expected to grow at a CAGR of 76% and hit the 180 billion mark by 2022. The Indian AR/VR market is expected to grow to $ 6.5 billion by the same time. We have a lot of significant players, both minor and major, in the areas of Technology and Platform Development, App Development, and System Integration, who could tap into the promising global Immersive Media Market. We can look forward to a time when India emerges as a large supplier of the global AR/VR demand, while also catering to the domestic segment.
How was TNQ Ingage Started?
It all started much before the company was founded. Vijay’s journey with this technology began in the year 2002 while at Intel, building the first generation bulky VR systems for healthcare industries. As a Director at Intel, he was part of the team that drove the 1st two waves of computing – desktop & mobile. He was fully aware that a third wave of “immersive computing” is around the corner where technology can sense, predict with the possibility of virtual presence anytime, anywhere using virtual and augmented reality.
And so he launched InGage Technologies in the year 2012, sensing the next wave of immersive computing that would make people change the way they create and consume content from observation to immersion.
Vijay has been in this industry for around 15 years and witnessed closely the seeds of transformation that we are experiencing now. His first-hand experience in this sphere and the knowledge of potential implications made him believe in immersive computing, which comes with a lot of scopes, thanks to its brilliance and transformative capabilities.
“We began our endeavors by coming up with India’s first-ever 4D Augmented Reality application in 2013 for Rajinikanth starrer Kochadaiiyaan Film. We had tied up with Karbonn smartphones & Kochadaiiyaan for the project.” Says Vijay.
The application, which allows Rajinikanth fans to see him perform stunts and actions right at their home, was then shown to the Superstar, who was quite delighted with the experience and approved the project immediately. The AR application received very positive feedback and won accolades across the world for its quality.
TNQ Ingage – Startup Launch
The belief in immersive computing, 18 years of international experience and the financial stability that Vijay achieved by then helped in launching the company with no user. Digital marketing, attending events, references through our good work and age-old networking helped in the acquisition of initial customers.
TNQ Ingage – Business Model and Revenue Model
The current focus is service business through customized AR VR short-term and long-term projects across the manufacturing, construction and healthcare industries. TNQ InGage just launched VR As A Service (VAAS) model that would give us a recurring subscription revenue. The team is also working towards launching products next year.
TNQ Ingage – Startup Challenges
Team building was a challenge since there was no AR VR development talent pool then. As a result, the top management had to train the hires within the company through a rigorous process to overcome that. At the time one of the AR platforms/App called Jaadu that lets people scan objects, images and find the cheapest deal available across on-line & nearby stores didn’t work out since it was too early for consumers to download the App and change their buying behavior. This posed a threat back then.
In early 2019, Eyeing strong AR & VR business opportunities in India’s enterprise market, TNQ Technologies has formed a Joint Venture (JV) with InGage to launch TNQ InGage. This Joint Venture brings together InGage’s immersive technology expertise and IP, and TNQ’s initial investment of $2 million and management expertise. The funding will be used to scale up the delivery of immersive products and services and invest in product R&D.
TNQ Ingage – Growth
As mentioned, the current focus is service business through customized AR VR projects across manufacturing, construction and healthcare industries. TNQ InGage also just launched VR As A Service (VAAS) model that would give them a recurring subscription revenue. The team is also working towards launching products next year. The future is quite positive and exciting due to the penetration and adoption of the immersive technologies in the enterprise market and the success, expertise, and clientele the venture has achieved so far
PV Vyshnavi
