Landlocked, not mindlocked: Digital brings flexibility

With a growing, ambitious population of youth with high digital literacy rates, Mongolia’s technology sector is poised for a revolution.

Anar Chinbaatar, Co-founder of AND Global and founder of ONDO, and Purevbazar Purevjav, Founder of FIBO Cloud, are two young Mongolians driving the change. Both looked across borders to secure the partnerships they needed to grow.

AND Global is a Mongolian fintech company that needed to scale up. Potential investors, whether at home or abroad, seemed most interested in mining. Nor did Mongolians’ historic reputation as rural nomads and herders match the company’s high-tech ambitions.

“Mongolia has one brand: Genghis Khan. Everyone in the world knows Genghis, but it’s already over 800 years old,” said Anar Chinbaatar. “We don’t have a Samsung, Google or Sony. We have to forge our own reputation for quality and innovation.”

Anar eventually connected with Satoshi Irie, an investment manager for the Japanese trading giant Marubeni, to secure the capital he needed. Today, Anar’s company has offices in five countries across Asia.

“Technology is the biggest opportunity for Mongolia,” said Anar. “It’s renewable, it’s also organic, and as a landlocked country, it doesn’t rely on our neighbours’ infrastructure.”

FIBO Cloud is a Mongolian cloud computing service company that aspires to support digital transformation in Asia. Purevbazar found himself stranded in Almaty during the pandemic. At the same time, the Kazakh government was looking for a new data warehouse service provider, as trade routes with Russia were disrupted. FIBO Cloud won a public tender with Transtelecom, the Kazakh telecom giant. Today, FIBO Cloud handles all cloud computing and storage for Transtelecom and serves as a consulting partner for Amazon Web Services. Purevbazar has also been recognized as a Mongolian Forbes “30 under 30”.