Iran Built a Startup Board. Almost Nobody Is On It.

Of 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.

Tehran Index holds public records on 369 companies in Iran’s digital economy. Seven of them can be bought on an Iranian exchange. That is the whole investable surface, one company in every fifty-three we map, and until now there has been no list of it in English anywhere we can find.

The seven are not what an outsider expects. Six of them were founded before 2010. The median founding year across all seven is 2000, the mean is 1998, and the oldest began operating in 1971. Exactly one, Tapsi, is a company of the smartphone era.

The listed set is the rails, not the internet

Read the table and a pattern falls out immediately. Three of the seven are payment service providers sitting inside banking groups. Two are telecom incumbents. One is an enterprise software house that has been selling accounting systems since the early 1990s. One is a ride-hailing company.

So a public-market investor in Iran cannot buy the consumer internet. Among the companies we map there is no listed e-commerce platform, no listed classifieds business, no listed app store, no listed streaming service and no listed digital bank, and the largest names in each of those categories are private. What is available is the infrastructure underneath all of them: the acquiring rails, the mobile networks, and the software that runs the back office.

We have argued the ownership half of this before. In Iran’s Banks Now Run 1 in 5 of Its Fintech Brandswe showed that 29 of 151 registry fintech companies are a licensed bank or telecom under another name. The listed set is that finding taken to its conclusion. When the only fintech you can buy on an exchange is a bank’s payment subsidiary, the equity market is not offering you exposure to Iranian fintech. It is offering you exposure to Iranian banking, wearing a product name.

Iran built a board for exactly this problem

This gap is understood domestically, and the exchange did something about it. The Nowafarin market was created the year before with two boards, Roshd for growth companies and Danesh-Bonyan for knowledge-based, technology and digital-economy companies, and it began formal trading on 28 December 2024. Ava Communication Industries traded first on the knowledge-based board that morning. Nine companies were admitted to that board and eleven to the growth board, with fifteen more in the admission review queue.

At the opening ceremony, the chief executive of Iran Fara Bourse, Mohammad Ali Shirazi, named the startups on the admission list. Three of them: Cafe Bazaar, YektaNet and Myket. The head of the Securities and Exchange Organization, Hojjatollah Seydi, said at the same event that the most important issue in the new market was valuation.

Nineteen months later, none of those three trades.

The Cafe Bazaar row is the one to sit with. It received its admission letter on 16 December 2024, after four years of applying, and only after Sarava, one of the best-known investors in the ecosystem, exited the shareholder structure of Hezardastan, the holding company that owns Cafe Bazaar and Divar. The letter came about a month after that exit. Weeks later, in January 2025, Cafe Bazaar was sold outright to Tapsell. It never traded a share.

The company waited four years for a listing, got it, and took a private trade sale instead.

The rulebook says who the board is for, and it is not the public

The admission criteria explain a good deal of the silence. They are published and specific.

Three things in that table matter more than the rest.

The first is the capital band on the growth board. A company must have registered capital of at least 100 billion rial and at most 5,000 billion rial. This is a market designed for small and medium enterprises, and it says so: Nowafarin was renamed from the exchange’s SME market. For scale, Tapsi’s registered share capital is 2,462,567 million rial, which is about half the ceiling. Iran’s only listed startup would only just fit on the board Iran built for startups. System Group would not fit at all. Its registered capital works out at 10,000 billion rial, double the ceiling, which is why it sits on the Tehran Stock Exchange main board instead.

The second is the free-float test, which requires 10 percent of registered shares to float, or a minimum free-float market value. That is a floor, not a ceiling, and nothing in the rulebook obliges a founder to give up control.

The third is the decisive one. Only professional investors may buy on the growth board: institutions, banks, insurers, holdings, investment companies, pension funds, underwriters, venture funds, and qualified individuals. The stated purpose of the market was strategic objectives rather than attracting retail investors. Iran built a startup board and did not open it to the people who use the startups.

The size of the thing follows from all of that. At 18 February 2024, the Nowafarin market was 0.27 percent of the total value of Iran Fara Bourse’s markets.

Meanwhile the exchange is being used, for something else entirely

None of this means the exchanges are idle. They are doing steady, consequential work. Just not the work of raising growth capital for young companies.

On 19 February 2025, 3,774,000,000 shares of Asan Pardakht Persian, 42.5 percent of the company, changed hands at a base price of 1,233 toman a share. Bank Shahr was the buyer. The sellers were Mehdi Shahidi and Hamed Mansouri, the co-founders, who left the register entirely. The consideration was 4,653 billion toman, about $58 million at the rate of roughly 80,000 toman to the dollar that Tehran Index uses for the January to February 2025 period. The company’s own statement put an approximate figure of about 11,000 billion toman on the whole business, which is their number and not ours. In the same statement the company noted that Bank Keshavarzi was already one of its main shareholders. One bank bought out the founders. Another was already inside.

That is the second time this has happened on an Iranian exchange in two years. In February 2024, a Golrang family vehicle took control of Tapsi through an on-exchange block trade and holds 69.21 percent on the shareholder attendance record, with the founders and early investors leaving the register in full. Tapsi had listed less than two years earlier, on 14 June 2022, at 939 toman a share with a 5 percent float that sold out in under an hour.

Our exchange rate note counted four disclosed control transactions in Iranian consumer technology and found all four buyers domestic. The Asan Pardakht block trade is a fifth on the same evidence standard, and it does not change that finding, it sharpens it. What is new here is the mechanism rather than the buyer. Twice in two years, a founding team has left an Iranian technology company through an on-exchange block trade, once to an industrial conglomerate and once to a bank. The listing was not the destination. It was the plumbing that made the handover possible.

What actually floats

The last piece is how little of any listed company is genuinely in public hands.

Where Tehran Index holds a sourced figure for the largest single holder, it runs from 42.5 percent to 69.21 percent. The Golrang vehicle holds 69.21 percent of Tapsi. Ayandeh Negar Dana Investment Management holds 61.92 percent of System Group. E’temad Mobin Development holds 50 percent plus one share of the Telecommunication Company of Iran, where the ownership breakdown also records 20 percent as justice shares held through brokerages, 5 percent with employees, and roughly 20 percent as genuine public float. Bank Shahr took 42.5 percent of Asan Pardakht in a single trade.

Put the two halves together and the market makes sense. A controlling holder sits on the majority. A minority sliver trades. The board designed to bring new companies in is capped by size, gated by a 21-document admission file that includes five years of tax assessments and a major-shareholder undertaking for pre-offering liabilities, and closed to the retail public on its growth board. The supply of listings stays at seven because every part of the design points that way.

What this means if you are trying to get exposure

Three conclusions follow, and none of them require a view on anything but market structure.

Listed exposure to Iran’s digital economy is exposure to payments and telecom. If the thesis is consumer internet, the public market does not carry it, and no amount of waiting for an IPO calendar changes that in the near term.

The listing route and the exit route are different routes. Companies here reach an exchange to hand over control, not to fund growth, and the two transactions that prove it were both block trades into a domestic institution. Anyone modelling an Iranian technology exit should model a domestic strategic buyer clearing on-exchange, and price it from what those buyers have actually paid.

And a listing letter is not a listing. Cafe Bazaar held one and never traded. Myket’s symbol has been admitted for a year without a trade. Admission is a milestone the Iranian press reports and the market does not act on, and the distance between the two is the number worth watching.

What we do not know

The gaps are part of the record. Seven is a floor on the listed count, not a ceiling. The Tehran exchanges list further information-technology, hardware and IT-services names that fall outside the digital-economy perimeter this registry maps, and we have not mapped that sector. Within our own registry we also know of at least one gap: Asiatech is a registry company reported to have offered 15 percent of its shares on the exchange in the spring of 2022, and our market layer does not yet carry a quote for it. We are naming that rather than quietly excluding it.

We could not read the Nowafarin admission rulebook in its original text, only a brokerage education desk’s summary of it, and one figure reported from the opening ceremony gives the growth board’s capital ceiling as ten times smaller than the rulebook summary does, which is exactly the rial to toman factor. We have published the rulebook figure and flagged the discrepancy rather than picking silently. We also do not know whether the ceiling test is applied to registered capital or to total shareholders’ equity, since both descriptions circulate.

We do not know the current shareholder register of Asan Pardakht, only the size of the block that moved and who bought it. We do not know why Cafe Bazaar chose a trade sale weeks after winning admission, because no party has said. We do not know the free float of four of the seven listed names to a sourced standard. And company-level trading status can change between our captures, which run fortnightly rather than daily, so every trading claim here is stated against the capture date and not against today.

One correction belongs here too, because we found it in our own work while writing this. Tehran Index has published the Tapsi IPO date as 19 September 2022 since 1 August 2026. It is wrong. The source was the company’s own blog post, whose content management timestamp carries a year that predates the listing and is therefore unusable. The offering was on 14 June 2022, confirmed by contemporaneous same-day reporting and two independent previews published two days earlier. The date is corrected across the site with this piece.

Cite as: Tehran Index, “Iran Built a Startup Board. Almost Nobody Is On It.”, 14 August 2026. Listed-company counts, founding years and closing prices computed from the Tehran Index company registry and market-quote layer, re-queried 14 August 2026. Nowafarin market launch, admission list and official quotations from Sharq Daily’s report of the opening ceremony, 28 December 2024. Admission criteria from the Iran Fara Bourse securities admission rulebook as summarised by Mofid Brokerage, 30 October 2024. Asan Pardakht block-trade terms from the company’s own public-relations statement, via Zoomit, 22 February 2025. tehranindex.com