➢ Innostart is a multi-region startup development program designed to build entrepreneurial capacity outside the capital, turning regional talent into a recognised pipeline of early-stage ventures. The program is delivered by SUP.VC as the organising partner with the support of the Innovation and Digital Development Agency of the Republic of Azerbaijan, and operates across four regional hubs in Sumgait, Ganja, Nakhchivan, and Lankaran. Each city has hosted multiple hackathon cohorts followed by an incubation track, with winning teams receiving investment-format prizes and a path into the wider startup ecosystem. Since its launch the program has supported the founding of more than 50 ventures, built a portfolio of regional startups across edtech, healthtech, agritech, and IT recruitment, and in August 2025 received official global incubator status from the Global Innovation Institute making it one of the first internationally certified incubators in the country.

The brief

➢ Azerbaijan's startup ecosystem is concentrated almost entirely in Baku. For the Innovation and Digital Development Agency, this concentration is both an asset and a problem: the capital produces founders, but the rest of the country produces almost none, even though regional populations include large numbers of technical graduates, motivated young professionals, and small-business operators with real market problems to solve. The challenge was to build a program that could do four things at once. Reach the regions with consistent, high-quality programming rather than one-off events. Convert raw interest into actual ventures by pairing hackathons with a structured incubation track. Operate across multiple cities simultaneously without losing program quality. And produce outcomes credible enough to attract international recognition. SUP.VC was brought in as the operating partner to design and run that program end-to-end.

Why the Innovation and Digital Development Agency partnered with SUP.VC

➢ Regional ecosystem development is operationally hard. Each city has its own infrastructure, university partners, mentor pool, and applicant profile, and a program designed for Baku does not translate. The Agency partnered with SUP.VC for the same reason public-sector innovation programs around the world increasingly rely on specialist operators: the state brings the mandate, the funding, and the institutional anchoring, and the operator brings the program design, the mentor network, the founder-side credibility, and the operational capacity to run cohorts in parallel across cities. SUP.VC contributed end-to-end program design, a national mentor and jury network that includes senior figures from BEU Technopark, UNEC Startup Incubator, ABB, Unibank, ADA University, and the Public Employment Agency, the operational ability to deliver multiple cohorts per region without sacrificing quality, and the international relationships that ultimately led to global incubator certification.

How the program works

➢ Innostart operates on a hackathon-to-incubation model. Each regional cohort begins with a two-day hackathon, hosted in partnership with the local innovation hub such as the Sumgait Innovation Hub where teams develop and pitch projects to a panel of jurors drawn from across Azerbaijan's tech ecosystem. The top three teams in each city receive investment-format prizes of 5,000 AZN, 3,000 AZN, and 2,000 AZN respectively. The top three winners and a fourth jury-selected team then progress into the Innostart Incubation Program, where they convert their hackathon prototypes into startup-stage ventures with structured mentorship, community programming, and access to investors. Each region has now hosted multiple cohorts, with cities such as Sumgait and Nakhchivan running second-edition hackathons that produced their own portfolio of ventures.

The portfolio

➢ The program's output is a regionally diverse portfolio of working startups. Backlify, NiyazED, SaleX, Codepays, Biolonic, and Student All emerged from Sumgait cohorts, covering IT recruitment, education technology, sales tools, chemistry visualisation, and university admissions support. Kimi, PriX, and İmyen came out of Nakhchivan, building a tutor and exam-preparation platform, a discount-tracking app, and an AI-based radiology diagnostic platform. Agrosphere and Youbase came out of Ganja, focused on agriculture and data infrastructure. Lankaran cohorts have added further ventures to the portfolio. Across all regions, the program has supported more than 50 venture launches.

What the Agency and the wider ecosystem gained

➢ The first outcome is geographic expansion of the startup ecosystem. For the first time, regions outside Baku now have permanent innovation infrastructure, a recurring program calendar, and a visible pipeline of locally founded ventures. This is a structural shift, not a series of events: the program has created institutional muscle in four cities that did not previously have it, and that muscle compounds with each cohort. The second outcome is international credibility. In August 2025, Innostart was certified by the Global Innovation Institute as an officially recognised global incubator the first program of its kind in Azerbaijan to receive that status. International certification matters in two ways. It validates that the program meets global standards in curriculum, mentorship, and venture outcomes, which is the prerequisite for cross-border partnerships and founder mobility. And it positions Azerbaijan, and specifically the Innovation and Digital Development Agency, as a country with an ecosystem capable of producing internationally legible startups a positioning asset that operates at the level of national innovation policy rather than individual cohorts. The third outcome is talent surfacing.

➢ The hackathons have created direct, high-signal relationships between the program and several hundred technically capable young founders, engineers, and operators in regions that traditional recruitment and venture channels rarely reach. Many of the strongest participants now sit inside the incubation track, the broader Innostart community, or the wider SUP.VC ecosystem, and represent a recurring source of talent for corporate partners, public sector innovation programs, and follow-on funding. The fourth outcome is a replicable operating model. Innostart is not a single program it is a system that has been deployed across four cities and multiple cohorts without loss of quality, which means it can be deployed again. For the Agency, for corporate partners interested in regional engagement, and for SUP.VC's wider portfolio of programs, that replicability is the asset.

What's next

➢ The Innostart model continues to scale, with new cohorts running across all four regions and the program's international standing now anchored by formal global incubator certification. The next phase focuses on deepening the incubation track, expanding the portfolio's access to follow-on investment, and using the program's international status as the foundation for cross-border partnerships and founder exchanges.