A founder from Uzbekistan launched Speko on Product Hunt.

An Uzbek founder has launched Speko on Product Hunt.

Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.uz) — Beknazar Abdikamalov, an entrepreneur from Uzbekistan and a previous Y Combinator accelerator selection, has launched his startup, Speko, on Product Hunt. Founded in San Francisco in 2026, the company specializes in building infrastructure for voice artificial intelligence (Voice AI), helping developers select the most effective voice AI service providers based on language and use case.

Speko offers a unified API that automatically selects optimal combinations of Speech-to-Text, LLM, and Text-to-Speech models. The platform regularly tests new models across a number of key metrics, including Word Error Rate, latency, Time to First Token, and cost per minute. The results of these tests are publicly available at benchmarks.speko.ai.

The system can also automatically reroute requests if another model starts to perform better, eliminating the need for developers to rewrite the integration. In the event of a failure at one provider, Speko can switch to a backup solution in less than 500 milliseconds.

"No provider can be the best at everything, and quality depends largely on the language. We route every request to the stack that currently performs best, and we publicly publish the supporting data at benchmarks.speko.ai," Abdikamalov commented.

The idea for Speko stemmed from the founder's experience at Hupo, where he served as co-founder and CTO for four years. Hupo has raised $14 million in funding and developed Voice AI-based solutions for clients such as Morgan Stanley, Prudential, HSBC, and Grab, working on projects in multiple languages.

According to Abdikamalov, the Hupo team had to manually compare speech models for each new market, and this experience formed the basis for the creation of Speko.

Before joining Hupo, Abdikamalov was a software engineer at Amazon and one of the first engineers at Tridge. He was accepted to Y Combinator on his fourth attempt, becoming the first solo founder from Uzbekistan to be accepted into the accelerator.

"I want kids in Nukus and Tashkent to see that you don't have to be born in Silicon Valley to build a company there. You just have to start creating," the entrepreneur emphasized.

The Speko team currently consists of four engineers from Central Asia. Launching on Product Hunt is the next stage of a startup's development, where early upvotes and user support influence the project's position in the platform's rankings.