SparkLabs, QIC, and IT Park Launch Silk Road VC Fund for AI-Native Startups

On September 20, 2026, Qazaqstan Investment Corporation (QIC), Uzbekistan's IT Park Ventures, Mirae Asset Venture Investment, and SparkLabs Group executed a term sheet to launch the SparkLabs Mirae Silk Road Fund I LP. Signed during the state visits of the Presidents of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in Seoul, the vehicle will be jointly managed by SparkLabs Group and Mirae Asset Venture Investment. The fund will concentrate capital on Series A and later-stage startups, specifically prioritizing AI-native enterprises where artificial intelligence forms the operational and product foundation. This development marks a significant institutional transition in how AI capital is distributed internationally. While foundation model developers and major hyperscaler regions capture the bulk of headline venture dollars, emerging technological ecosystems in Central Asia are capitalizing on demographic momentum, domestic compute initiatives, and government-backed industrial support. Following regional milestone successes such as Higgsfield achieving unicorn status, cross-border funds like SparkLabs Mirae Silk Road aim to institutionalize local growth and provide the capital runway necessary for regional engineering teams to scale globally. The initiative fits into a broader macro trend across the AI and cloud landscapes: the regional diversification of talent and infrastructure. As training and inference costs place pressure on standard operating models, AI engineering organizations are decentralizing R&D operations away from high-cost global centers. Central Asian economies, underpinned by substantial energy assets and active public digital-transformation programs, are creating environments that foster competitive unit economics for AI services and specialized fine-tuning workflows. In practice, DevOps, cloud, and engineering leaders should track how sovereign-backed venture expansion affects talent distribution and global multi-region architecture strategies. As startups funded by such regional initiatives expand, enterprise teams will encounter new tooling, localized agentic systems, and cross-border API endpoints originating from non-traditional tech hubs. Engineering organizations looking to expand their distributed engineering footprint or source localized AI components can increasingly look toward Central Asian ecosystems as viable operational partners.