TechRasa team wishes you a very happy, prosperous and healthy new year! Today we’re celebrating Nowruz, the Iranian Persian new year and it’s a great time to look back and reflect on the highlights of the past year and the new year’s outlook.

What a year it has been! Thank you to all of our readers, subscribers and contributing guest writers and anyone who embraced our mission to further expose the Iranian startup ecosystem.

Aside from the ups and downs, we had a great year along with you lovely people! To take a look at our demographics, 26% of users come from Iran, while 18% are from the United States and the rest goes to United Kingdom, Germany and Canada. From the region, after Iran, United Arab Emirates and Turkey have the most number of visitors on TechRasa.

During the past Persian year (1396) 300 different types of content including news, articles, infographics, podcasts, videos and reports were published on TechRasa. Of course, this could not have been achieved without the help of our amazing team of contributing writers. We’d like to take this chance and thank Hamidreza Zare, Tadeh Alexani, Daryoush Dehestani, Kamyar Goodarzi and Amir Hussain Abedinpour who had the most number of published guest-written articles on TechRasa in the past year.

Last year, along with the articles which we published on TechRasa.com, we also put more effort to report the news and statistics on our Farsi channel on Telegram. For our Farsi speaking audience we encourage you to follow TechRasa Farsi to get the inside news and the highlights of the tech scene in Iran.

A few months back, TechRasa along with Hamfekr and a group of entrepreneurs and tech enthusiasts organized the country’s first road trip in order to find the country’s best startups. Silk Road Startup’s Road Trip was held from October 22nd to 31st and after a series of pitch competitions in 7 cities of Iran, 16 startups were selected to pitch at the finals in Kish Island. Silk Road Startup Summit will be held in April and the ticketing is now open.

For the upcoming year, our main focus would be more on market research and the reports which we’ll be publishing for free with the help of our sponsors. We’re excited to announce that in the upcoming months you can read the first report on “Messaging Apps in Iran” with detailed information which has not yet been published anywhere else.

Iran Startup Ecosystem in the New Year (1397)

In the past year, we saw that the Iranian banks started to get more involved in the country’s tech scene, either by facilitating, investing on startups or by supporting the accelerators and the incubators. This resulted in the emergence of a number of FinTech apps, mostly mobile payment.

For the upcoming year, we expect to see more mergers and acquisitions by the tech giants in the country. Although many of the current players in Iran’s startup scene have been funded by foreign investors (mostly through Sarava VC), we expect to witness more local investments in this sector as the traditional investors are becoming more aware of the potential available in the country’s tech scene, thanks to the success of Snapp and Digikala.

There will probably be a fierce competition among the players who are working on local messaging apps, since the fate of Telegram is yet not clear in Iran. Currently, the government is helping local messaging apps in anyway possible to replace the foreign competitors.

There have been some rumors about Twitter and YouTube being unblocked in the upcoming Persian year which for now we have to first wait and see what the government’s approach would be towards Telegram.

And as always, despite the challenges we’re positive about the upcoming changes for Iran’s tech scene. Happy Nowruz!

In my heart you are the mirthful ray

You are the caring, though my companions they

Happy is the world with the Nowruz and with the Eid

You are both my Eid and my Nowruz today

– Rumi