NEWS YOU CAN’T MISS

The $100M Plan to Upgrade Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan, one of Central Asia’s biggest and fastest-growing countries, has long been bogged down by slow, paperwork-heavy government services. Registering a car or getting a license often meant long queues, stamps, and stacks of documents.

At the same time, with an average age of just 29, the country has a young population and leaders want to make sure they’re ready for an AI-driven economy.

This week, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev rolled out an ambitious plan to fix both issues at once: slash bureaucracy and train millions in AI literacy by 2030.

Part of the plan:

• 95% of all government services will go digital, so people can skip the lines entirely.

• Service time for more than 100 services will be cut in half.

• Paperwork will disappear: Out of 40 million, 25 million documents will be digitized

• A “5 Million AI Prompters” program will teach how to use and apply AI (4.75 million school students, 150,000 teachers and 100,000 government employees)

• Plus, $100M will be allocated to integrate AI into schools.

Why does this matter? Because Uzbekistan is rightly trying to leapfrog stages of development with AI and tech. The plan is exciting. Now it’s all down to execution and talent.

Are You Balding? Get an AI Opinion

The hair-loss industry is a mess - confusing products, sketchy clinics, and hairdressers who’ll say you’re “thinning” just to sell you an expensive shampoo.

Now, a new startup says it wants to cut through the chaos with MyHair AI, an app that scans your scalp and gives you the truth, minus the public embarrasment.

You take a few photos of your head, and the AI analyzes hair density, checks for early signs of thinning, and tracks changes over time. It’s trained on 300,000+ hair images, built to be more accurate than panic Googling or salon guesswork.

The app already has 200,000 users, 1,000 paying subscribers, and even clinics using it to speed up evaluations. Would you use it?

Meet Luana Lopes Lara, co-founder of Kalshi

Highlighting this week’s Woman in Tech: Meet Luana Lopes Lara, co-founder of Kalshi - the first federally regulated prediction market in the United States.

Born and raised in Brazil, Lara spent her early years in the world of ballet. She trained at the Bolshoi Ballet School before deciding to pursue a different kind of discipline: mathematics. That decision took her all the way to MIT, where she earned degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics.

She built a career in quantitative finance and research, working as a trader at Citadel Securities and Five Rings Capital, a software engineer at Bridgewater Associates, and a researcher at MIT’s CSAIL and Brain & Cognitive Science labs.

In 2019, she co-founded Kalshi, a platform where people can legally trade on real-world events (like inflation, interest rates, hurricanes, or elections) - making this idea legal required years of regulatory battles.

Luana helped lead Kalshi through a long review with the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, eventually securing a federal license no startup had ever received.

Not everyone loves the idea. Some critics see prediction markets as too close to gambling, and several state regulators are still challenging how far platforms like Kalshi should go.

But the impact is undeniable: Kalshi has raised over $400M, hit a $2B valuation, and created a new way for people and institutions to hedge uncertainty.

From ballet in Brazil to building a new financial category — Lara’s path is anything but ordinary.