Iran's Biggest Tech Investment Came From a Mobile Operator

Ask who funds Iranian startups and the answer usually reaches for a venture firm. The honest answer, on the disclosed record, is a mobile network operator. Iran’s largest, Hamrah-e Aval, trades on the Tehran Stock Exchange under the symbol Hamrah and runs a venture arm called Harkat Aval. That arm publishes its whole portfolio on its own website, in Farsi, with no English version. Sixteen companies. Two of them marked as exits.

We read the page in full on 18 August 2026 and checked every entry against the Tehran Index registry. Nine of the sixteen have no record with us at all, and we hold 369 public companies. That is the finding in one line: the single largest disclosed source of growth capital in Iran’s consumer technology sector has a portfolio that is more than half invisible in English, including to us.

The operator is not a passive investor

Harkat Aval was founded in October 2018 and describes itself as the venture investor of the Hamrah-e Aval group, with the stated mission of “realising the digital dream”. That reads like corporate copy until you look at what it bought.

On 10 August 2024, DigikalaGroup published an announcement, reproduced in full by the technology outlet Zoomit, stating that Harkat Aval had taken 40 percent of the group by cash purchase, buying out Sarava Pars and part of other shareholders’ holdings. The announcement gives the agreed valuation for the transaction as 30,000 billion toman, about $484 million at the 2024-25 average of roughly 62,000 toman to the dollar. That valuation is the parties’ own, disclosed by them, and we report it as theirs. Tehran Index does not publish its own valuation of a private Iranian company and does not do so here.

The founders, Hamid and Saeed Mohammadi, kept 22 percent and two of five board seats, and the announcement is explicit that no shareholder alone controls the company. It also notes that Sarava Pars was leaving after twelve years, which it called the largest successful venture return in the country’s digital economy.

The number that makes this a balance-sheet story

Here is what nobody has put side by side. The announcement gives the valuation and the percentage but not the cash paid. Forty percent of 30,000 billion toman is 12,000 billion toman. Call that the derived stake price, and be clear that it is our arithmetic on two published numbers rather than a disclosed consideration.

Now set it against the buyer. MCI reported consolidated net profit of 8,003 billion toman for the financial year ended 20 March 2025, the same year this transaction was announced, on total revenue of 74,000 billion toman. The derived stake price is 1.50 times the operator’s entire net profit for that year, and about 16 percent of its revenue.

A venture fund deploys committed capital and answers to limited partners. This is a listed operator putting a year and a half of group profit into a single minority stake in an e-commerce company, and reporting it to shareholders who bought a phone company. Whatever else that is, it is not venture capital in the shape the word usually carries. It is closer to a telecom deciding that the returns on Iranian consumer internet beat the returns on more spectrum.

The whole portfolio, named

Sixteen entries appear on the page. Two of them are extensions of another position rather than separate bets: the arm itself describes Achareh Sazeh as a spin-off of the Achareh team, and Chi Bekhoonam as founded under the Alaa group. Collapse those and the book is fourteen distinct businesses. Both counts are printed here on purpose, because printing one alone invites a reader to derive the other and get it wrong.

The shape of the book is worth reading. It is spread across e-commerce, travel, mobility, logistics, education, media, health, property and server hardware. What it contains none of is fintech. That is not because the operator has no fintech: it runs Ewano, which describes itself as a product of a company in the MCI family, and the board of the insurance broker i-Bimeis seated by MCI-affiliated entities. Those sit on the corporate side, not in the venture arm. We should be precise about the second one: board composition is evidence of control, not a filed shareholding, and we have not seen i-Bime’s cap table. The operator keeps payments and insurance close and lets the venture arm take the rest, which is the same instinct we found among the banks in Iran’s Banks Now Run 1 in 5 of Its Fintech Brands. This piece is the telecom cut of that ownership question, and it does not repeat the banking argument.

Two exits, and why they were possible

The portfolio page marks two positions with the Farsi word for exit. That is unusual enough to be the second finding here, because the standing line on Iran is that nobody exits.

The documented one is Jajiga, the private accommodation rental platform. Harkat Aval bought 20 percent in the Iranian month that ended on 22 August 2019. On 13 January 2024 the trade outlet Digiato reported the exit, with co-founder Babak Sohrabi confirming it publicly: the founders bought the stake back and the shares returned to them in full. Harkat Aval’s own statement said it had received several offers from larger industry players but gave priority to the original owners. Sohrabi’s account is blunter and more useful. He said the arm brought good offers for the stake, the buyers it had in mind were not agreed by the founders, and so under an agreement the founders bought the shares themselves. He added that Jajiga is profitable and could continue bootstrapped.

That is a founder buyback, which is the least glamorous exit route and, in this market, one of the few that clears. And it points at something our earlier work missed. In Iran’s Exit Problem Is an Exchange Rate Problemwe showed a foreign investor marking an Iranian portfolio down 36.7 percent in euro terms while its largest holding grew revenue 90 percent, because the constraint was the rate at which value could be converted out. A domestic corporate investor never meets that constraint. Harkat Aval raises toman from a toman business, buys in toman, and sells to a toman buyer. There is no conversion in the chain, so there is no conversion problem. That is the new contribution here: Iran’s exit problem is not that exits do not happen. It is that they only happen inside the currency.

The second marked exit is Netbox, a content-delivery platform of hardware and companion software built by students at Sharif University of Technology’s technology complex, per the arm’s own descriptor. Four Iranian trade outlets reported the investment in the same week of August 2021, which is as firm as that date gets. We could not read a source that dates the exit, so we do not print one.

What this does to our own investor count

In Who Actually Funds Iranian Startupswe reported that Tehran Index tracks 17 investors, nine of them venture arms of conglomerates, banks, a telecom and capital-markets institutions. That count is correct as published and it is also incomplete in a way this research exposed. Harkat Aval is not one of the seventeen. The investor behind what its counterparty called the largest investment in the history of the country’s digital economy was not in our investor layer, and one telecom-linked firm, Iratel Ventures, was carrying the whole category.

We are recording that rather than quietly fixing it. The registry write is flagged for review, not made by this note. Finding a hole in your own denominator is a better outcome than not looking.

What we do not know

Quite a lot, and the gaps are load-bearing. We do not know what Harkat Aval paid for any position except by arithmetic on Digikala’s disclosed valuation, and that arithmetic assumes the whole stake priced at the agreed valuation. The announcement does not publish a cash figure. We do not know the size of the arm, its committed capital, or whether it has one. We do not know its stake percentage in thirteen of the sixteen companies. We do not know what the Jajiga stake sold for, only that the buyer was the founders. We do not know when the Netbox exit closed.

Two conflicts in the sources are worth naming rather than smoothing. Digiato’s Jajiga report says both that the stake was bought in the Iranian year running from March 2019 to March 2020 and that the holding lasted three years, which does not reconcile with a January 2024 exit. We publish both and pick neither. Separately, Miare appears on Harkat Aval’s portfolio page while our own registry records it under Digikala Group, and a third firm lists it too. Multiple shareholders would explain all three, but we have not verified the cap table, so our group attribution on that record should be treated as unconfirmed until we do.

MCI’s full-year revenue also sits on the record twice, as 74,000 billion toman and as 67,944 billion toman for services and sales. We publish both rather than choosing, and the ratio in this note uses net profit, which is not in dispute.

Why it matters

For anyone sizing Iran’s innovation economy from outside, the practical consequence is that mapping the venture firms maps the wrong thing. The capital that moved the market’s largest transaction did not come from a fund. It came off a listed operator’s balance sheet, and it is disclosed, in Farsi, on a website nobody has read in English. There are 369 companies in our registry, only five of the sixteen positions in this one portfolio carry a single published fact with us, and nine are not in the registry at all. The gap between what is disclosed in Iran and what is legible outside it is not a data problem at the source. It is a translation and structuring problem, which is the whole reason this record exists.

We are adding Harkat Aval to the investor layer and opening records for the nine missing companies. Those will be dated when they land, as they always are.

Cite as: Tehran Index, “Iran’s Biggest Tech Investment Came From a Mobile Operator”, 18 August 2026. Portfolio and exit labels from Harkat Aval’s own portfolio page, read 18 August 2026. Transaction terms from Digikala Group’s announcement of 10 August 2024 as reproduced by Zoomit. Jajiga exit from Digiato, 13 January 2024. Registry coverage and the profit ratio computed from the Tehran Index registry and facts layer, 18 August 2026, n=369 public companies.