Amirkhan Omarov took the long way through the parking lot

In October 2021, Amirkhan Omarov was fishing with friends in Brazil when a message arrived from QazTrade Accelerator. His parking business had been selected for an export programme. The possible destinations were Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and the United Arab Emirates. The first two were already familiar territory for the company. He chose the UAE, then interrupted his journey home to Kazakhstan with two days in Dubai.

Some visitors inspect Dubai’s restaurants. Omarov inspected its parking lots. He said he walked through more than a hundred during that stopover, a peculiar itinerary for anyone without a lost car. By the end, he believed there was demand for Parqour’s technology. He had also arranged a pilot with a property company at Concorde Tower, a 45-storey office building with eight floors of parking.

There is something revealing about that detour. A camera can read a number plate from a distance; understanding the customer still calls for a closer look. Omarov’s career has repeatedly brought him back to physical places: offices, shared workspaces, buildings and the awkward business of getting cars into them. Dubai offered a new market. His first research instrument was a pair of feet.

Before the cameras, a room for friends

Long before those parking inspections, Omarov was thinking about how to keep people together. The idea behind SmArt.Point, the Almaty coworking space he founded, had a social beginning. Friends scatter as their lives develop. He wanted a place they would keep coming back to. Commercial property experience and an interest in technology eventually gave that wish a business form. SmArt.Point opened at the end of 2017.

Almaty had been his home since 2003, when he arrived from Shymkent at seventeen. His affection for the city was practical and particular: friends, mountain walks and Sunday football. In 2018, he described early starts for walks to Butakovsky waterfall and games with friends in the mountains. He also admitted that his home cooking happened once or twice a year, with friends serving as the tasting panel.

He enjoyed biographies and autobiographies, too. Other people’s experiences, he said, could widen his perspective. That taste suits someone moving between established businesses and new ventures: there is always another life to borrow an angle from. Yet in that 2018 conversation, with SmArt.Point already open, he said he was still searching for his life’s work. A functioning business had not settled the question.

An economist among the technologists

Omarov studied international economics at Suleyman Demirel University, graduating in 2007. He remembered English-language teaching, accessible lecturers and a community whose friendships continued into working life. He helped found an intellectual club, organising debates, chess competitions, quiz tournaments and business conferences. Before he was coordinating a company, he was coordinating people who wanted to argue, play and exchange ideas.

His subsequent employers included Ernst & Young, Alageum Electric and Mercury Properties. At the end of 2018, he was invited to lead digital technologies at construction group BI Group. The route matters. His technology career developed alongside property management and corporate operations. He had seen buildings as working businesses, with costs, customers and small operational failures that could accumulate into expensive habits.

Coworking gave him one answer to the question of how a building might work differently. Parking suggested another. A shared office needs its particular community and a suitable location. A parking operation also has local complications, but the recurring transaction is readily recognisable: a car arrives, stays and leaves. For an entrepreneur seeking a business beyond Kazakhstan, that repetition offered a place to begin.

“First there must be an idea, then expertise.”

Amirkhan Omarov · 2021 · translated from Russian

The ticket was already on the car

At SmArt.Point, parking availability and management had become a problem. In 2020, Omarov, then the coworking space’s general manager and a co-founder of Smart Parking Technology, chose to test the company’s number-plate recognition system instead of buying conventional parking equipment. The trial worked. Other customers in Kazakhstan adopted the technology, and the business later took the name Parqour.

The proposition is easy to picture. A camera identifies the car’s plate. Software records movements and connects parking activity with payment and management tools. An owner can see entries, exits and revenue rather than reconstructing the day from scattered records. Drivers have online payment options. A number plate, already attached to the car, can do work that previously required another object to be issued and collected.

That modest substitution reaches into the economics of the property. Every visit needs to become a reliable record; every payment needs to match the right stay. Omarov’s earlier experience makes the attraction understandable. He was working on a business problem he could inspect at the premises he managed. The useful test was whether the system made that place easier to operate, followed by whether another owner wanted it.

A passport does not close the sale

The Dubai pilot was a beginning, with relationships needed around it. By May 2022, the local operation had offices at Concorde Tower and in a WeWork near Dubai World Trade Center. Omarov’s longtime friend Bakhtiyar Rakhmattullayev, formerly in KPMG consulting, headed the Dubai office. Business development and support for installed systems gave the overseas venture responsibilities that continued after the first handshake.

Omarov also described the disadvantages of coming from a country without a widely recognised technology-export reputation. Networks matter: diaspora communities, established business connections and people who can open a door. A product must still find customers when those shortcuts are scarce. It is a more demanding account of international expansion than the familiar photograph of a founder standing beneath an airport departure board.

Later came a Saudi foothold. In February 2024, Parqour announced an office at The Garage startup hub in Riyadh. By February 2025, Omarov was preparing for his third consecutive appearance at the LEAP technology event. The pattern is one of return visits and local presence. An export market becomes less abstract when somebody has to answer the customer’s next question there.

Kairat, meet Real Madrid

By September 2023, Omarov put Parqour’s monthly recurring revenue at $350,000, with roughly 35 percent coming from foreign markets. Those are figures from that stage of the journey. His explanation of the difficulty was equally concrete: expensive pilots, salaries and long sales cycles made overseas expansion costly. He estimated that entering demanding markets could require at least $3 million to $5 million.

To describe the challenge of convincing his own team, he reached for football. Imagine Almaty’s Kairat trying to compete with Real Madrid, Paris Saint-Germain, Manchester City and Juventus. Belief would need training, better tactics, creativity and endurance beside it. The comparison carried a founder’s ambition, but also an admission about the preparation required to face established competitors.

It is an apt metaphor for someone who liked Sunday football before Parqour existed. A good intention rarely survives an entire match unaided. Omarov’s task included persuading colleagues that international competition was possible, then turning that confidence into decisions and routines. The scoreboard matters, though a business has the additional inconvenience of needing to keep paying for the next fixture.

The neighbours have their own rules

For Omarov, Uzbekistan comes with personal connections. He has described himself as being from Shymkent, close to the border, with relatives and relationships in Uzbekistan. In September 2025, he discussed a fully local Tashkent team and the need for Uzbek-language interfaces and communication. Familiarity with a neighbouring country did not remove the work of making a product fit it.

Payment habits were one example. He described Kazakhstan as a market where online payments had become widely familiar. Uzbekistan required several payment integrations and continuing support for cash. For a parking operator, these are immediate questions: how does this driver pay, and what happens if the preferred method is unavailable? A shared regional history does not guarantee an identical checkout.

His ambition also reached beyond managing individual sites. In that 2025 discussion, he outlined an “Airbnb for parking” idea: connect spaces left unused at different times of day. Residential parking can empty during working hours; office parking can empty overnight. He presented a marketplace as something the team was working towards. The appeal is characteristically grounded in property: make better use of space that already exists.

Still willing to be a student

In April 2025, Parqour was selected alongside Aidentis and TrustExam.ai for the Stanford-affiliated StartX Summer Boot Camp. The selection came through a partnership involving Astana Business Campus and the Nazarbayev University Social Development Fund. On LinkedIn, Omarov thanked those supporting the company, including mentor Olzhas Tulebayev, and described the programme as an opportunity to reconsider product, business model, strategy and culture.

There is continuity with the advice he gave entrepreneurs in 2021. He urged them to know their industry, find expertise where they lacked it and keep applying to investors and accelerators. Rejection could teach a team where its project remained unfinished. He also wanted Kazakhstan to be recognised for ideas and technology alongside its resource exports. Those ambitions make a parking company carry a rather larger personal assignment.

The early SmArt.Point question was where people could come together. Parqour’s question concerns how people arrive, pay and leave, and whether the business around those movements can work better. Omarov has followed that question from an Almaty coworking space into unfamiliar cities. The Dubai stopover remains a good image of the method: an international ambition, pursued one ordinary parking entrance at a time.