Nov. 19, 2020

Earlier this year, ASEEL was selected as one of the top 100 startups in the global Entrepreneurship World Cup. ASEEL competed with over 100,000 startups globally to be crowned as one of the top 100 startups in the world. As part of the EWC Program and to support our mission of creating 10,000 jobs in Afghanistan, EWC sponsored ASEEL to become an active Amazon Web Services (AWS) recognized startup. With this partnership, ASEEL will receive a free service to the ASEEL platform for 11,500 USD that we will be using to support our artisans and partners in Afghanistan to develop mobile applications and websites.

ASEEL continues to progress as the end of 2020 approaches. Earlier this month, we launched our platform at an event in Kabul, signaling that ASEEL was ready to ship products from all parts of Afghanistan both to any customer in-country as well as to the US, UK, and Australia. In addition to that victory in the business operations side of the house, we are proud to announce that our Technology and Development team has officially migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The move to AWS signals that ASEEL is ready to vastly improve the technologies it uses to build up its platform to empower global artisans. As an AWS-powered startup, ASEEL joins a prestigious community of tech-based startups like Doordash, Deliveroo, and Airbnb. 

ASEEL’s stride from the previous platform towards AWS’ more flexible and resilient platform means that our business will be able to modernize our existing applications, make our continued global expansion more smooth, and harness all of AWS’s technologies to continue empowering local, family-owned, and women-owned artisan businesses in Afghanistan.

ASEEL’s migration to AWS comes just as the team is gearing up for the holiday seasons in the US, UK, and Australia and as we look to expand our vendor network at the very start of 2021. AWS will position ASEEL to increase our sales, marketing, data usage, and technology upgrades available through AWS to keep up with holiday demands. And improving our architecture in our website and IOS apps (with our Android app pending) will ensure that our vendor expansion goes smoothly and efficiently. 

This is an amazing achievement for the ASEEL team and the rest of the entrepreneurship ecosystem in Afghanistan. ASEEL is blazing the doors open to collaboration with major tech giants and exploring other ways of supporting the entrepreneurship ecosystem in Afghanistan to further make gains and assist Afghanistan’s poverty alleviation. We are hopeful to open doors not just for the ASEEL platform but for the rest of the community as well.