Original, source-linked analysis of Iran's innovation economy, the companies, the capital, and the signals beneath the headlines.
Behind the headlines sits a country of 92 million, 73 million online, with a full digital economy that looks like a major emerging market few outsiders have mapped. Here is the whole map.
Read the field guide →Cafe Bazaar handles most of Iran's Android app distribution, and for five straight years it published what developers earned through it. The last figure is 280.5 billion toman, for the year to 20 March 2021, from 27.1 million purchases by 3.73 million buyers. Its own five-year series shows the payout rising 4.14 times in nominal toman while the number of people who paid for anything rose 11 percent. Then the money left the report: the two later annual editions Tehran Index holds, one of ten pages and one of 110, carry no figure in toman or rial anywhere.
Read →BriefingTI Weekly, edition 008. Okala reports more than 26 million users in 275 cities, SnappMarket widens agency status to neighbourhood supermarkets after a 30-store first phase, Asiatech’s monthly revenue runs more than 35 percent above a year earlier, Aparat invites creators to repost short videos, Milli puts its trade counts on a public page, and our analysis reads a week in which online gold published its flows but not its holdings.
Read →Super-appsSnapp carried 1.61 times Lyft's rides in its latest year, 4.18 million trips on an average day against 2.59 million, from one country against Lyft's eleven. Lyft has more riders, more cities and faster growth. Six measures where both companies publish a number, with what does not compare set out beside them. No. 08 in the Iran in Context benchmarking series.
Read →Super-appsSnapp's ride-hailing service carried 1.51 billion trips in the year to March 2025, 1.83 times Lyft's 2024 rides and 16.5 for every person in Iran. Its own reports, read across five editions, show growth falling from a third a year to 0.8 percent while driver accounts kept rising. No. 07 in the Iran in Context benchmarking series.
Read →DataSix Iranian companies have now measured the twelve days of 13 to 24 June 2025 in their own operating data, and four of the six did it in Persian reports nobody appears to have read in English. Behpardakht Mellat, a listed payment processor, says its systems ran the whole period at 99.99 percent availability with daily transactions within six percent of its two preceding monthly averages. Above those rails, Digipay recorded super app transactions down 66 percent and instalment repayments down 13 percent, over the war and the days after it, which it attributes not to unwillingness to pay but to the hack of the infrastructure of the two banks it names. YektaNet's advertiser budgets bottomed 79 percent below the pre-war fortnight on day ten while in-app advertising impressions rose 28 percent. Digikala's best-selling digital good was a hardware cryptocurrency wallet, up 218 percent, on a platform whose modem sales fell 27 percent while modem page views doubled.
Read →DataEvery Iranian listed issuer files a monthly activity report, and for a payment company it is the only filing that breaks revenue into named contract lines. Six companies in Iran’s card-payment industry filed one for the month ended 22 September 2026. Tehran Index read all six and added them up: 39,637,874 of 62,343,547 million rial, 63.58 percent of the combined revenue of the five listed payment service providers, is buying mobile phone top-up and selling it on. At Asan Pardakht Persian, the largest of the six by revenue that month, the Shaparak transaction fee line is 4.28 percent of revenue and the PIN and credit line is 93.13 percent. One of these companies runs a 4.79 percent audited gross margin on that revenue.
Read →BriefingTI Weekly, edition 007. Milli says an order has been issued to release the 965 kilograms of customer gold held at the custodian bank that denied holding it, Daric says every gram of its users’ gold sits at that same bank, Flytoday enters holiday lodging at zero fee and zero commission, ArvanCloud offers outside GPU owners 40 percent of what their hardware sells, Digikala’s marketplace turns ten, Vista opens an acceleration track on Irancell capacity, and our analysis reads a week in which online gold’s question moved from the app to the vault.
Read →DataSarwa, regulated in Abu Dhabi, crossed $1 billion in client assets in May 2026, held through Saxo in Denmark and, for trading, Alpaca. Across the 375 companies in the Tehran Index registry, 25 are retail investment apps: robo-savers, broker and fund apps, trading apps and gold platforms. Not one names a foreign security or a custodian outside Iran. The app layer exists; the custody chain stops at the border, and gold fills the gap.
Read →DataBehpardakht Mellat is one of the two largest payment processors in Iran and it is listed in Tehran. Every month it files a four line breakdown of its revenue that nobody outside Iran appears to read. In the six months to 21 June 2026, Shaparak processing fees were 32.2 percent of its revenue, reselling mobile phone top-up was 38.1 percent and the largest single line, and contracts with its own parent Bank Mellat were 26.8 percent. The same filings show revenue up 56.9 percent and net profit down 29.9 percent, because total borrowings rose 4.59 times in eighteen months and finance costs now take 75.1 percent of operating profit. Across 1,289 public facts in the Tehran Index registry, three carry a finance cost and all three are Tapsi.
Read →DataEvery reach figure Tehran Index has published about an Iranian consumer app has been an Android figure, and so is every one this desk has found in English anywhere else. Tehran Index has now read a domestic iOS catalogue twice, 3,251 listings on the second pass. For the sixteen companies captured on both platforms on the same day, the iOS download figure runs from 0.09 percent of the Android figure to 12.90 percent, and across the ten pairs large enough for the rounding not to matter it still runs 0.09 to 5.20 percent, a 56-fold spread. The iOS share is a property of the app, not of the country. The two platforms do not even publish the same live field: the rating count moves on 88.7 percent of Cafe Bazaar listings in a week and on 10.2 percent of Sib App ones.
Read →DataEleven Iranian crypto exchanges publish an account or user number on their own websites. Added together the eleven come to about 45 million accounts. Tehran Index holds 22 crypto exchange records and checked every one against the state eNamad database: four carry the state's general e-commerce trust seal, which is not an exchange licence, three of those four have expired, and one is current. Seven of the 22 say nothing about their own standing on the pages we read, including the two most installed apps in the sector. One exchange does have audited accounts in public, and only because a listed venture fund owns 2.6 percent of it. This measures what these companies disclose. It is not a finding about anyone's compliance with a rule this desk has not read.
Read →BriefingTI Weekly, web edition of 25 September. Digikala Group publishes its year: sales value up 56 percent against average prices up 74 percent, 426,865 active sellers against 466,169 sellers in the previous report, and one purchase in five on four-instalment credit. Digipay reports three growth rates that do not reconcile, Hezardastan’s venture fund opens, Nobitex drops seven US share tokens on an unnamed directive, and AzkiVam lends into gold.
Read →E-commerceDigikala's annual report for the year to 20 March 2026 says, in words, that items per order has risen significantly, from small baskets to multi-item baskets. The chart printed on the same page shows items per order peaking at 5.0 and falling in each of the last four years, to 3.8. The report's own headline growth figures point the same way as the chart: value of goods sold up 56 per cent against average price up 74 per cent implies roughly 10 per cent fewer items sold.
Read →DataIran's venture funds file on Codal, and in most of their audited statements sits a note called summary financial information of venture investments. For the private companies inside those portfolios it is often the only place a revenue or profit figure appears in public at all, in any language. Tehran Index scored fifteen of those notes, from twelve funds, against five fields a reader needs before a number is usable. Two print all five, and both of those use the field to say the figures came from a tax return or an unaudited trial balance. Six of fifteen say where the numbers came from at all. Across the 49 investee rows that carry a period, the accounts run from the fund's own reporting date to twenty four months behind it.
Read →BriefingTI Weekly, edition 006. Snapp screened about a million driver applicants and rejected 60,545, Alopeyk puts its capacity at 300,000 orders a day after absorbing Zap, Digikala opens storefronts for Instagram sellers, Azki says instalments passed cash at 54 percent of purchases, Snapptrip claims growth into a falling hotel market, and our analysis reads what three supply-side announcements chose not to publish.
Read →DataHarkat Aval is the venture arm of Hamrah-e Aval, Iran's largest mobile operator, and it has filed financial statements on Codal twice a year for six years because its parent is listed. Tehran Index has read the two most recent. In the year to 20 December 2024 its investment book rose 4,372.8 billion toman, six times over, and the audited cash flow statement records no cash paid to acquire an investment at all. The money came from a payable inside the group. A year later 2,508.0 billion toman of share capital appeared, again with no cash recorded against it. At that year end the whole vehicle held 15.9 billion toman of cash, a quarter of one percent of its assets.
Read →DataThe Tehran E-Commerce Association has published the first national measurement of Iranian retail, and it lands two findings at once. Online retail is 4.8 percent of the country's retail spending, well below what the conversation assumes. And the Instagram shop economy, at about 89 thousand billion toman, is of the same size as the formal platform sector it is usually treated as a footnote to. The study also contradicts the share figure Digikala published for the same year.
Read →DataLarge multinationals describe their own corporate structure in detail, and a group with an Iranian subsidiary or an Iranian partner usually names it, with the city and the percentage held, in the last forty pages of its annual report. Tehran Index read ten such reports and found fourteen Iranian entities, from Irancell and Rightel to a network company Nokia says it controls. Three of the fourteen were on our register. The method has one large blind spot, and it is worth stating first: a private group publishes none of this, so Tetra Pak's Tehran office appears in none of it.
Read →BriefingTI Weekly, edition 005. Iran names 19 September for a national digital identity wallet, Khodro45 publishes its first annual report after eight years, Bale stays off both Android stores in a commission dispute, Aghsat Market raises 300B toman, and our analysis reads voluntary disclosure against the one audited figure that only exists because a third party had to file it.
Read →DataIranian venture funds are listed issuers, and the audited statements they file on Codal carry a note printing each portfolio company's own revenue and net result. Tehran Index read that note across 25 audited letters from 17 funds. Of the 28 companies carrying a dated income statement, 18 made a net profit in their latest reported period, and 12 of the 21 technology companies did. The scale is the catch: at the audited 2024-25 average of about 70,000 toman to the dollar, the largest technology name in the set turned over about $16.4 million, the second about $4.7 million, and sixteen of the twenty one turned over less than 100 billion toman.
Read →MarketsBetween 8 July and 2 September 2026 the Tehran Stock Exchange all-share index rose 23.02 percent and the dollar rose 23.56 percent against the toman on the Tehran Index daily currency series. All seven listed technology and telecom companies in our registry of 377 public records went up in rial. Three of them went down in dollars. The exchange's own computer sector index and the Iran Fara Bourse index both land within one and a half points of zero on the same adjustment.
Read →DataIranian venture funds are listed issuers and their auditors print what they sold and for how much. Across 17 of the 28 audited fund filings on Codal, six completed exits carry a price: 11.2 billion toman in, 22.1 billion out, a median multiple of 2.0, and five of six buyers private individuals. One health platform was bought back by its founder at 9.1 times cost.
Read →MarketsIran Fara Bourse publishes the roster of its Noafarin market, the board built for startups and knowledge-based companies, and twenty months after trading opened it names eleven companies. Three carry a technology classification and one of those three is suspended. The other eight are chemicals, food, metals, medicine and cloth. The board is 0.36 percent of the exchange's market value, one of its ten most recent offerings was on it, and none of the eleven appears in the Tehran Index registry of 371 public companies. The technology companies that do trade on this exchange are all on other boards.
Read →DataTehran Index read Cafe Bazaar and Myket on the same day and matched them by Android package identifier. Forty four apps appear in both. The two stores publish a different install figure for all forty four, the ratio between them runs from 0.67 times to 17.1 times, and the same app scores 0.27 of a star higher on the smaller store. Divar's listing reads 100 million against a national Android base of 61 million. The field everybody quotes barely moves; the field nobody quotes moves every day.
Read →BriefingTI Weekly, edition 004. Multi-provider in-store credit goes live on two Iranian food platforms, the Central Bank names ten connected wallet providers, BNPL reaches a quarter of covered platform sales, Shopino posts the first fashion-marketplace run rate in the record, and 42 companies queue for an IFB listing.
Read →DataMTN's reviewed interim statements for the six months to 30 June 2026 publish the assumptions behind the impairment test on its 49 percent stake in Irancell: a weighted average cost of capital of 79 percent, 44 percent and 36 percent, a terminal growth rate of 25 percent and capex intensity of 20.3 percent. Of the 370 companies in the Tehran Index registry, not one had a published cost of capital before this. The same notes carry a reviewed rial rate that implies 145,793 toman to the dollar, close to the free market rather than to any official rate.
Read →DataIrancell publishes no revenue, no profit and no balance sheet. All of it is filed twice a year in South Africa, audited and in English, because a JSE-listed company owns 49 percent of it. That filing also carries three accounting facts about Iran that exist in no Iranian source, including a company that keeps two year-ends. Of the 370 companies in the Tehran Index registry, two have a shareholder that files on a stock exchange, and it is the same shareholder for both.
Read →BriefingTI Weekly, edition 003. TAP posts the fastest transaction growth of any Iranian payment processor in the 2025 Nilson Report, Taline maps Iran's gold ecosystem, Digikala puts AI try-on in the storefront, and our analysis reads Nilson against Shaparak for the first two-instrument view of Iran's payments market.
Read →DataTalabat raised about $2.0 billion in cash on the Dubai Financial Market, twelve days from pricing to trading. Across the 369 companies in the Tehran Index registry, nine records touch a change of ownership, six are completed transfers, every buyer is domiciled in Iran, and the one foreign institutional seller took a deferred claim instead of cash. Not one of the six carries written deal terms.
Read →OwnershipHamrah-e Aval trades on the Tehran Stock Exchange and runs a venture arm, Harkat Aval, that discloses a 16-company portfolio on a Farsi-only page with no English equivalent. Two of the sixteen are marked as exits. One stake, 40 percent of Digikala Group, works out at 1.5 times the operator's entire net profit for that year. Nine of the sixteen companies have no record in the Tehran Index registry of 369.
Read →DataOf the 369 companies in the Tehran Index registry, seven can be bought on an Iranian exchange, and one of them is a startup. Iran Fara Bourse opened a purpose-built board for startups on 28 December 2024 and named Cafe Bazaar, YektaNet and Myket as its candidates that morning. Nineteen months on, none of the three trades. The rulebook explains why, and it is not an accident.
Read →DataTapsi's finance costs came to 815 billion toman in the year to 20 March 2026, 3.43 times its entire operating profit, and swung Iran's only listed startup to its first loss since going public. The bill was not demand. It was debt, taken on after a capital increase stalled in regulatory review, and it is the only cost-of-capital number in Iran's technology sector that is audited and public.
Read →Travel techDigikala's founders paid 300 billion toman for a quarter of Donse, announced on 9 August 2026. It is personal money, not a Digikala transaction. And Donse is not a hotel chain: alongside its properties it runs a development arm and an investment platform whose stated purpose is channelling domestic capital into tourism projects.
Read →DataTehran Index tracks 17 investors in Iran's innovation economy. Nine of them are not independent firms at all, they are venture arms of conglomerates, banks, a telecom and capital-markets institutions. None of the seventeen publishes a fund size, and nine cannot be reached from outside the country. The fund that built the ecosystem wound down in January 2025.
Read →DataOne Swedish investor publishes the only audited, annually marked valuation of an Iranian technology portfolio we have found anywhere. In the year to 30 April 2025 it wrote that portfolio down 36.4 percent. In the same report, its largest holding grew revenue 90 percent. The gap is not about the companies. It is about which exchange rate you are allowed to convert at.
Read →DataOf the 151 fintech companies in the Tehran Index registry, 29 are a licensed bank or telecom operating under a separate brand, and six institutions run two or three each. Count the apps and you count banks twice. The pool of genuinely independent fintech equity is closer to 90 companies than 151.
Read →LogisticsIran has had professional parcel delivery since 1960: Tipax runs 1,100+ offices, Mahex states reach into 202 countries. Digikala, Snapp and Tapsi built their own fleets anyway, nearly all of it between 2016 and 2023. Who owns Iran's last mile, why the platforms built instead of buying, and what is left for the independents.
Read →Super-appsTwo armed conflicts and a nationwide internet shutdown hit Snapp's super-app in one year. Orders fell as much as 80% in the worst weeks. It still closed 2025-26 with more users and a bigger share of its market than it started with. The company's own annual report, read line by line, next to Uber's COVID-19 collapse. No. 06 in the Iran in Context benchmarking series.
Read →FintechOn its all-time record day, Snapp moved 5.39 million trips, a share of Iran's population that still beats China's ride-hailing giant on an ordinary day. It holds close to 90 percent of its home market. Next to Uber, DiDi and Careem, the honest caveats matter as much as the number. No. 05 in the Iran in Context benchmarking series.
Read →FintechIran's buy-now-pay-later market reached 75,000 billion toman a year, built entirely on domestic rails with no card network behind it. But on its own numbers it reaches barely one in fifteen of the people who could use it, against Gulf platforms already deep into their addressable market. No. 04 in the Iran in Context benchmarking series.
Read →BriefingTI Weekly, edition 002. Five source-linked signals across macro, mobility, e-commerce, govtech and crypto, plus our own benchmark placing Iran's digital banks next to Nubank, KakaoBank and Chime.
Read →E-commerceDigikala's founder has put a dollar figure on Iran's largest e-commerce platform for the first time, about $1.2 to 1.3 billion a year in merchandise value. Next to Trendyol, Hepsiburada and Jumia, the scale is real and the currency hides most of it. No. 03 in the Iran in Context benchmarking series.
Read →MethodologyA standing benchmark: where the crawlable English record, which every AI inherits, is stale or wrong on Iran's biggest companies, next to the Tehran Index registry-verified fact. Cafe Bazaar's owner, Snapp's CEO, Digikala's control, Aparat and Filimo as one entity.
Read →FintechIran's largest crypto exchange alone reaches about one in nine people. On ownership per person, Iran sits above the world average and in the same band as the United States. No. 02 in the Iran in Context benchmarking series, anchored on the Tehran Index registry.
Read →FintechIran's digital banks serve about 20 to 22 million people, close to a quarter of the population, built since 2019. Placed next to Nubank, KakaoBank and Chime, Iran's adoption sits with Turkey and above the United States per person. First in the Iran in Context benchmarking series, computed from the Tehran Index registry.
Read →FintechIran's fintech economy runs across twelve verticals, from super-app rails moving trillions of toman a year to a crowdfunding market of 12.8 trillion toman. Each shown on the measure that fits it, with the ownership lens that shows how a few groups reach across many of them. Built from the Tehran Index registry.
Read →DataThe brand on the app is rarely the company that signs the contracts, and the CEO you read about is rarely the registered director. Tehran Index has now anchored 164 of 210 companies to their legal entity, a layer nearly invisible in English, and this is what it reveals.
Read →DataWhat 212 verified companies actually look like when you map them: a fintech-heavy, private-JSC economy still defined by its 2014 to 2017 founding generation, where a third of companies sit inside groups, computed entirely from the Tehran Index registry, denominators stated.
Read →BriefingTI Weekly, edition 001. Five source-linked signals across telecom, AI policy, e-commerce governance, insurtech and mobility, the Digikala record, one chart, and a standing list of what the market still does not disclose.
Read →OverviewIran has the population, the penetration, and the platforms to host several billion-dollar startups. It has none on the world’s unicorn lists. Here is what Snapp, Digikala, and Tapsi would be worth in a normal economy, and why the gap is the whole story.
Read →FintechIran transacts digitally and borrows analog. Fintech lenders hold roughly 2% of a 1,827 trillion toman consumer lending market. That gap is the clearest growth story in Iranian fintech, and this is its running record.
Read →E-commerceMost coverage of Iran’s internet economy starts and ends with Digikala. The real map has three layers, and a large share of the country’s shopping happens inside Instagram DMs.
Read →ClassifiedsIran’s most-used commerce platform is not a shop. It is a classifieds app where forty million people buy and sell cars, homes, and phones directly, with no middleman taking a cut.
Read →FintechNo Visa, no Mastercard, no PayPal. And yet Iran runs one of the most-used, highest-penetration digital payment systems on earth, on rails the outside world has never heard of.
Read →Super-appsOn its busiest day on record, Snapp logged 5.39 million rides. The same app feeds Iranians, stocks their fridge, books their holiday, and lends them money.
Read →Travel techIranians book flights, trains, and hotels through slick local apps in seconds, on a market that handles tens of millions of trips a year. Booking.com and Expedia are barely part of it.
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