Iran’s Startup Exchange Is Mostly Food, Metals and Textiles

Iran 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.

Iran Fara Bourse publishes the list. It is on its own website, in English, and it takes about four seconds to read, because there are eleven companies on it.

The Noafarin market is the venue Iran built for startups and knowledge-based companies. It runs two boards, one for growth companies and one for knowledge-based ones, and it began formal trading on 28 December 2024. Twenty months later, on 1 September 2026, the exchange’s own issuer roster names three companies on the knowledge-based board and eight on the growth board. Its own market-value table, dated the same day, independently reports eleven symbols in that market, carrying 0.36 percent of Iran Fara Bourse’s total market value.

Three of the eleven carry a technology industry classification. One of those three is suspended.

The roster

Here is the whole thing. The exchange itself publishes this roster in English, on a page anyone can open, and as far as we can find nobody has ever read it out. That gap between published and read is the ordinary condition of this market, and it is the reason to reproduce the list rather than describe it.

The knowledge-based board holds Ava Industries, whose Farsi registered name is Ava Communication Industries and which the exchange puts in information and communication; Pooya, in computer and related activities; and Mehr Mom Mihan, classified under human health and social work. Mehr Mom Mihan is the largest company on the entire market by registered capital, at more than 2.7 times Ava’s.

The growth board holds eight companies: a chemicals complex, two food and beverage producers, a steel cord maker, an electrode manufacturer, a pharmaceutical materials company, a textile producer, and Rahyab Gostaran, which is in information and communication and which the exchange marks “Forbidden-stop”, its own English label for a symbol suspended from trading. The exchange does not publish the reason and we do not infer one.

Read plainly: on the growth board of Iran’s startup market, there is exactly one technology company, and its shares are halted.

The board is not where the technology listed

This is the part that reframes the thing. Iran Fara Bourse does list technology companies. Counting the two classifications the exchange itself uses for them, information and communication, and computer and related activities, there are ten outside the Noafarin market: four on the First Market and six on the Second Market, against three on Noafarin. Widen it to include the exchange’s separate class for manufacturers of computer, electronic and optical products and two more appear, one on each of the ordinary boards and none on Noafarin. Among the six on the Second Market is Tapsi, the only digital-native Iranian startup whose shares trade anywhere, in the same table as Yazd Rubber Industries and Zagros Petrochemical.

Tapsi went public in June 2022, two and a half years before the startup board opened, so it could not have listed there. But it has not moved there since, and neither has anything else. When the chief executive of Iran Fara Bourse described the exchange’s digital-economy pipeline on 31 August 2026, he named two companies. One, CinemaTicket, is going to the knowledge-based board. The other, an information-technology company called Fanavaran Ettelaat Khobreh, is being prepared for offering on the Second Market.

The exchange’s own offering log makes the same point without commentary. Of the ten most recent share offerings on Iran Fara Bourse, nine were on the Second Market. One was on Noafarin.

Admitted, listed, offered, traded

Four words that English coverage of this market treats as one, and that Iranian market mechanics treat as four separate events with months or years between them. Getting them apart is most of the work.

CinemaTicket is the clean worked example, because all four stages are dated. The company, Fanavaran Ideh Pardaz Sarzamin-e Honar, sells tickets for cultural and entertainment events. Fara Bourse’s admission board approved it on 15 March 2025. Its registration with the Securities and Exchange Organization completed on 26 August 2026, under number 12593. Its symbol was inserted in the exchange’s price list with effect from 28 August 2026, as the 403rd Fara Bourse trading symbol and, per the exchange’s own notice, the eighth company on the knowledge-based board.

Five hundred and thirty one days from admission to symbol. And the shares still have not been offered: Digiato noted on 29 August 2026 that the prospectus had not yet appeared on the Fara Bourse site. CinemaTicket does not appear on the roster above, or in the eleven-symbol count in the market-value table.

This is why a headline saying a number of companies are queuing for an Iranian listing carries almost no information about when, or whether, anyone will be able to buy them. The queue is long and the door is narrow, and the distance between the two is measured in years.

What our own registry says, and does not

Tehran Index holds 396 company records, 371 of them public. None of the eleven companies on the Noafarin market is one of them, and that is not a coverage gap we intend to close. Our registry covers Iran’s digital economy. Eight of the eleven make chemicals, food, metal, medicine or cloth, and they fall outside that perimeter by design. The board named for innovation is populated mostly by companies an innovation-economy registry has no reason to carry.

One near miss is worth naming, because anyone repeating our search will hit it. Our registry contains a company called Sekkeh. It is a gold-trading fintech. It is not Sekkeh Food Industries, the confectioner on the growth board. The two share a name and nothing else.

On the other side of the same question: seven of our 371 public companies trade on an Iranian exchange in our market layer, captured on four dates between 8 July and 26 August 2026. Six of the seven are on the Tehran Stock Exchange. The seventh is Tapsi, on Iran Fara Bourse’s Second Market. None is on Noafarin. Across 701 public facts, not one names this market.

What this adds to what we published before

In Iran Built a Startup Board. Almost Nobody Is On It. we established that the board exists, that the chief executive of Iran Fara Bourse named Cafe Bazaar, YektaNet and Myket as its startup candidates on the morning trading opened, and that the admission rulebook explains why none of the three trades. What that piece could not do was say who is on the board instead. This does.

The answer changes the argument. “Almost nobody is on it” turns out to be the wrong shape of complaint. The board is populated. It is populated by a textile producer, two food companies and a steel cord maker, and its one growth-board technology company is suspended. A venue can fail by staying empty. This one is failing while full.

What we do not know

The largest open question sits between two of our own published numbers. Sharq Daily, reporting the opening ceremony on 28 December 2024, said nine companies had been admitted to the knowledge-based board and eleven to the growth board, twenty in total. We published that. Fara Bourse’s own roster on 1 September 2026 shows three and eight, eleven in total. Both surfaces use the word admitted. We cannot reconcile them from anything published, because the exchange does not maintain a public register of companies admitted but not yet carrying a live symbol.

Our own record suggests the mechanism without proving it. Myket’s symbol was admitted to this board on 12 August 2025 and its shares have never traded, and Myket is not on the roster. If admission alone does not put a company on the list, the two counts are measuring different things rather than describing a market that shrank. We think that is the likely explanation. We have not confirmed it, and until we do, nobody should report that companies left this board.

The exchange’s own notice for CinemaTicket calls it the eighth company on the knowledge-based board, against a roster showing three. Same problem, same page. The 403rd-symbol figure is also on a different basis from the 1,097 symbols in the market-value table, which counts sukuk and fund instruments as well as equities; we quote both as published and reconcile neither.

We do not know why Rahyab is halted, and nothing on the exchange’s public pages says. We do not publish a dollar figure for this market anywhere above, and that is deliberate: the exchange gives a share of total market value, which needs no exchange rate, and our own canonical conversion rate is a July 2026 rate that does not properly cover a 1 September figure. A wrong rate would make a real number useless. Registered capital, likewise, is a nominal legal figure and never a valuation.

And we do not know what the eleven are worth individually, because the exchange publishes market value by market and not, on this surface, by symbol.

Cite as: Tehran Index, “Iran’s Startup Exchange Is Mostly Food, Metals and Textiles”, 1 September 2026. Roster, market values, issuer tables and offering log read directly from Iran Fara Bourse on 1 September 2026 in both language editions. CinemaTicket admission and symbol dates from Fara Bourse’s notice as reported by Zoomit and Digiato, 29 August 2026. Registry counts computed from the Tehran Index company registry and market layer on 1 September 2026. tehranindex.com