The BIT-AMENA Center has successfully concluded its new, two-week tech entrepreneurship course at Berkeley-Haas this month focused on business people from Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. A total of 25 students— a third of them women—participated in the inaugural course July 5-15. They included a mix of aspiring and current entrepreneurs, students, lawyers, government officials, and businesspeople from Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Russia, Qatar, among other countries.

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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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