Biography
Asset Begaliyev is the CFO of Beksar, a Kazakh startup providing a suite of digital tools (digitizing inventory, business analytics, POS…) to SMEs across Central Asia.
To date, Beksar has 4,000 paying customers, $70K MRR and is present in three countries (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan). The company has raised around $400K and is currently raising a bigger round.
What’s Beksar’s genesis?
I’m not an original co-founder, I joined the adventure a bit later on.
Beksar was started by three other guys. Our CTO initially coded a program for the gift shop he owned, to digitize inventory management and spend less time on manual tasks. Our two other co-founders respectively ran a women’s clothing shop and owned an auto-parts business. They met our CTO and started using the program for their own shops.
All three saw clear potential, and each eventually sold their businesses to focus on and scale Beksar into a proper tech startup.
What is Beksar’s product today?
It’s a software program for both individual retailers and chains.
If the client has no technical background, they can use Beksar’s “basic” features, where they stick barcodes onto their products, scan them and start tracking their inventory digitally (as they scan the barcodes when they sell stuff).
This solves a massive pain for our clients: stock count. Without Beksar, many clients have to close their shop to count their inventory manually. With Beksar, they can check their inventory levels live, digitally, without pausing operations.
More advanced clients can use our business analytics features, to do sales and budget forecasting for example. To power that, all Beksar products integrate with various POS systems.
Source: Kazakh government
You’ve also dabbled in hardware. Can you elaborate?
Indeed, we’ve started importing physical POS tablets from China, rebranding them as Beksar and selling them to clients. It’s an additional income stream for us. Today, some Beksar clients use our software on their own devices and others use it via our own physical tablet.
What does your client base look like today?