Minora AI is changing how major brands manage their marketing operations by turning campaign briefs into complete strategies and media plans in just minutes. What used to take weeks now happens almost instantly. Co-founder and CEO Shakhnoza Yusupova explains how the company grew from a small experiment to a rapidly expanding international startup.
Yusupova and her team had spent over five years building Muna Media, one of Uzbekistan’s leading advertising agencies. Working with clients from more than twenty countries, they noticed a recurring problem: preparing campaigns was painfully slow. Even reviewing a brief could take several days, followed by endless rounds of market research, audience analysis, offer creation, and media planning. They realized much of this process could be automated.
That insight led to the creation of Minora AI, a platform that converts a simple marketing brief into a ready-made strategy and media plan in just a few minutes. The idea began as an internal experiment at Muna Media. Using AI and automation, the team prepared a proposal for a major client in only a few hours, a task that usually took days.
Seeing the results, they built a minimum viable product in three weeks and launched it immediately. The outcome was impressive: sales reached about $30,000 in the first month. The company didn’t need to search for new talent; marketers, developers, and analysts from Muna Media simply joined forces to build the product.
From the start, Minora AI decided to work only with large brands spending at least $10,000 on advertising. These clients often face complex challenges: running multiple campaigns at once, creating offers quickly, developing precise media plans, and tracking performance in real time. Companies such as Uzum have already adopted Minora AI to simplify and speed up their marketing workflow.
The journey wasn’t without setbacks. The team was initially rejected by Andreessen Horowitz’s Speedrun program and Y Combinator’s Fall Batch, but they persisted and were later accepted into the Plug and Play accelerator. Their business development and engineering teams are currently participating in the program while continuing to apply for Y Combinator’s upcoming batch.
Funding has been self-sustained so far, using Muna Media’s resources to maintain full control over the product and decision-making. Building something entirely new in Central Asia brought challenges, especially when dealing with large corporate clients who required lengthy contracts, invoices, and approvals.
Integration with Azma Finance helped solve these issues, while a partnership model offering the platform to agencies at a low cost allowed for faster scaling.
Yusupova believes the biggest lesson from this journey is simple: focus on clients who can pay and truly need your product.
Many startups fall into the trap of chasing small businesses with small budgets, but sustainable growth requires bigger partners and a global mindset. The team now targets the global advertising market, valued at more than $700 billion and projected to double within six years.
The company’s proudest achievement is how quickly it reached product-market fit. Almost immediately after launch, clients began paying and actively using the platform.
For Yusupova, that is the clearest sign they are solving a real problem. While awards and media mentions are nice, she says the true success is in satisfied customers who keep coming back. The next major step for Minora AI is to expand into the U.S. market and repeat that success on a much larger scale.
By the end of the year, Minora AI plans to introduce AI-generated video creation, so brands can receive not only a marketing strategy and media plan but also a finished advertisement ready for distribution.
The company is also investing heavily in research and development to tackle global marketing issues such as banner blindness and the lack of monetization in user-generated content. Today, over 90 percent of online user content brings no revenue despite its massive potential, an untapped market worth around $100 billion.
While global giants like Tencent are exploring similar technologies, Yusupova wants Minora AI to be the first company to bring such solutions to the international market. Her vision is to make campaign creation effortless, data-driven, and globally scalable, helping brands everywhere move faster and make smarter marketing decisions.
