The application period for the President AI Award 2026 continues in Uzbekistan—this is the country's first presidential competition focused exclusively on startups operating in the field of artificial intelligence. The deadline for submitting registration documents is set for August 15.
The competition includes a total investment fund of one million dollars. Support will be provided to fifteen AI startups whose solutions address areas such as public administration, industry and entrepreneurship, healthcare, education, green economy, and agritechnology.
The main requirement for participation is the existence of a functioning minimum viable product (MVP); projects that are only at the conceptual stage are not eligible to participate. To register, the team must provide a description and presentation of their project, as well as a video no longer than three minutes, a link to the prototype, and participant information.
Applying teams must consist of 3–8 people over eighteen years of age. Both citizens of Uzbekistan and stateless persons with permanent residence in the country are eligible to participate.
Three winners will be selected in each of the five thematic categories. The prize places include the following investment amounts: first place will receive $100,000, second place $60,000, and third place $40,000.
The investments will be provided by IT Park Ventures in two stages, contingent upon achieving predetermined performance indicators. Additionally, twenty-five of the most promising teams will participate in an acceleration program, the finalists of which will demonstrate their developments to investors at the Demo Day event scheduled for December.
Applications can be submitted free of charge until August 15 via the platform awards.gov.uz. Current information and important announcements about the competitions are published in the Telegram channels @PresidentTechAward and @president_ai_award. The media partner of the competition is the publication The Tech, and the entertainment partner is the mobile application OQ.
The implementation of enterprise software has encountered a significant hurdle. Companies are acquiring advanced artificial intelligence tools, but integrating these tools into legacy systems remains a slow, costly, and complex task. To solve this problem, the company June AI has raised $20 million in seed funding.
Deploying enterprise software is a labor-intensive and complicated process. Globally, organizations invest hundreds of billions of dollars annually in configuring, integrating, and supporting their core systems. Businesses aim to integrate models like GPT, but the presence of years of technical debt complicates the operation of such systems. There are very few seamless connections between older platforms, such as SAP, Oracle, Workday, and Salesforce, and modern cloud data infrastructure.
June AI directly addresses this implementation gap. Instead of forcing companies to hire expensive external consulting teams, the startup uses AI agents to optimize the integration process. The platform functions as an automated digital bridge, analyzing enterprise workflows and automating repetitive configuration tasks, which significantly reduces the time required for enterprise software setup.
The process at June AI begins with deep system analysis and process mining. The platform studies existing database logs to determine how business workflows are actually executed within an organization. After mapping these hidden patterns, the system identifies operational bottlenecks and automates structural changes in the software. This technology works natively in core data environments such as Databricks and Snowflake.
By mapping inter-system relationships, June AI ensures that updates in one department do not disrupt subsequent processes. The platform allows engineers working directly in the system and system integration teams to deploy enterprise AI agents with less friction and lower overall costs. The global systems integration market is expected to reach over a trillion dollars in the coming decade. As companies increase their investments in AI, automated integration will become an integral part of corporate infrastructure. Advanced foundational AI models are of little value if enterprises cannot connect them to their real-time operational data.
The founding team brought deep experience in enterprise software to solve this problem. June AI is the brainchild of CEO Ephrat Rapoport, CTO Idan Zittat, President Barak Goldstein, and Chief Architect Ohad Hen. The founders previously developed the conversational intelligence platform Bonobo AI, which Salesforce acquired in 2019. Over the past five years, they led key product and engineering teams within Salesforce, gaining firsthand experience with challenges in the enterprise sector.
They noticed that purchasing AI software is relatively simple, but implementing it into disparate user workflows is extremely difficult. June AI was created to replace manual professional services with automated software workflows, providing faster value realization for modern enterprise solution buyers. With the $20 million in new capital raised and support from leading industry figures, June AI is well-positioned to innovate in automated deployment. By eliminating technical debt and accelerating integrations, the company helps businesses move from simple AI demonstrations to fully functional automated operations.
