BPEDME’s Advisory Council member Stephan Chambers on iBridge Berlin in the Financial Times.

A thousand Iranians from around the world arrived in Berlin last week to talk entrepreneurship. Their project was not much short of building modernity through tech start-ups. They asked many good questions of each other; and one terrible question, “How can we be like Silicon Valley?” — one that should be banished from the entrepreneurial canon from Shoreditch to Singapore.

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In the week following the framework nuclear deal between world powers and Iran, Tehran-based Internet entrepreneur Faty Amir Soleimani pitched every day to Western investors for funding.

“We started getting a lot interest from foreigners,” said Ms. Soleimani, who runs an e-commerce site for baby products called Koodakoo. “When I say a lot, it was really a lot.”

Amid a global glut of investment into Internet companies, Ms. Soleimani’s experience suggests that Western investors are eyeing perhaps their most risky bet yet: Iranian startups.

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A support system of mentors, seed funders and venture-capital funds has begun to take shape, but financing can still be hard to find and, while Iran produces many top-class computer engineers, business experience is still scarce.

“Access to finance for start-ups is still at a very nascent stage,” Mohsen Malayeri, co-founder of the Iran Entrepreneurship Association, told Reuters at the iBridge conference.

“We have talented engineers but understanding market dynamics is different.”

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The visit is one element in a rapidly shifting business landscape in Iran as investors prepare for a lifting of the sanctions if a nuclear deal is signed in coming months between Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and world powers.

Rouhani’s election in 2013 on a reformist platform had already brought “a huge change of interest in Iran,” said Rouzbeh Pirouz, Harvard-educated chairman of Turquoise. “Now, with the prospect of the nuclear agreement, that interest has been much, much more.”

The group showed the outsiders the best-performing sectors in Iran: cement, which benefits from low energy costs; mobile telecommunications in a country of 80 million people with mobile phone penetration of 105 percent; and food and beverages, in which one firm, Behshahr Industrial Development Corp., quadrupled its profits over the past two years. Read more.