Rastock AI will have a stand at Baku ID 2026 on 17 and 18 September, at the new SABAH.city innovation campus in Baku. If you are attending, that is where you can watch a real batch of files go from bare images to described, keyworded and delivered — on the spot, on our machines, with no slides between you and the product.
Baku ID is organised by SABAH.HUB Innovation Center and describes itself as the regional nexus: the leading innovation and startup investment platform for the Caucasus, Central Asia and MENA. Previous editions have gathered 13,500 participants and 375 startups, with $5.5 million in investment commitments made through the event. This year's strategic partners are the Ministry of Science and Education of Azerbaijan, PASHA Holding, SOCAR and C4IR Azerbaijan. The 2026 programme runs on two stages, Fire and Wind, with 45 sessions over two days: keynotes and investor panels on one, a Startup League and the Startup World Cup on the other, plus the Nexus Awards. Investors from Azerbaijan, Central Asia, Türkiye, Georgia, the Gulf, North Africa and Europe are on the attendee list — more than fifty investment organisations, from venture funds to accelerators and angel networks. Full details, the agenda and passes are on the event site.
What you will see at the stand
The demo is deliberately unglamorous, because the work it replaces is unglamorous. Someone brings a folder of images. We drop them into the platform. Each file is analysed, given a title, a description and a set of keywords written for how buyers actually search, and checked against the rules of the agency it is going to. Then it goes out over FTP or SFTP to the destinations that are connected, and the status of every file is visible in one place.
That is the whole product. Metadata generation, per-agency compliance, multi-agency delivery and status tracking inside a single workflow, currently reaching 10+ stock agencies including Adobe Stock, Shutterstock and Magnific. Bring your own files on a USB stick if you want to see it run on your work rather than ours.
We will also be showing the Trends module — what is being searched for on the agencies right now, and where the gaps are — and the Chrome extension that adds the same metadata engine to the agency upload pages contributors already use.
Who should stop by
Stock contributors and studios first. If you photograph, illustrate or generate for stock and you upload two hundred files a month or twenty thousand, the questions we most want to hear are the uncomfortable ones: what breaks, which agency rules trip you up, what you tried before and why you stopped. Those conversations shape the roadmap more than anything else does.
Investors second. Rastock AI is raising a pre-seed round, and both founders will be at the stand for the full two days. The short version of the story: over 1 million files processed to date, a user base across the United States, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, and $110,000 in non-dilutive cloud credits already issued through Microsoft for Startups, NVIDIA Inception and AWS Activate. Meeting slots can be booked through the Seeder platform that Baku ID uses for investor matching, or you can simply walk up. More on the company.
Third, anyone building for creators or e-commerce. Stock is our first market rather than our last one. The same problem — files that cannot sell until someone describes them — appears in product catalogues on Etsy, Shopify and Trendyol, and in the video and short-form space. We are keen to talk to people working on adjacent pieces.
The problem, in one paragraph
Visual content only enters commercial circulation once every file carries structured metadata: a title, a description, keywords and a category. Produced by hand, that step becomes the main bottleneck in production, and it grows faster than the portfolio does — a contributor with 10,000 files is not 10 times slower than one with 1,000, they are effectively stopped. Rastock AI reads the image, writes metadata matched to the destination's requirements, and delivers the prepared files to multiple agencies in one pass. The commercial terms have not changed and will not: no revenue share, no claim on your files, and IPTC and CSV export stay open.
Practical details
Baku ID runs on 17 and 18 September 2026 at SABAH.city, the innovation campus outside Baku that is hosting the festival for the first time. Gates open at 09:00 and the opening session on the Fire Stage starts at 10:00. Two sessions are worth circling if you are raising or investing: the afternoon panel on VC investment flows across the Caucasus, Central Asia, Türkiye and MENA, and the evening panel on first cheques, angels and syndicates. Free shuttle buses run to the venue, and a Bolt discount is available for rides to and from the site. Rastock AI is one of the startups in the showcase area; look for the pink R.
If you cannot make it, the platform is not going anywhere. The trial runs for 14 days, covers 30 files end to end including real FTP delivery, and needs no card. Everything we demo at the stand you can run yourself the same evening.
Thanks
To SABAH.HUB, which selected Rastock AI for the startup showcase and prepared the stand, and to the Baku ID team for putting a regional investment event together at this scale. Rastock AI is also part of Microsoft for Startups (supported by Azerbaijan's Innovation and Digital Development Agency), NVIDIA Inception and AWS Activate — the Microsoft for Startups story is here — and a good part of the compute behind tomorrow's demo is running on those programmes.
See you at the stand.
Frequently asked questions
When and where is Rastock AI exhibiting at Baku ID 2026?
On 17 and 18 September 2026, at SABAH.city in Baku, which hosts the festival for the first time this year. Rastock AI has a dedicated stand in the startup showcase area for both days; gates open at 09:00. Baku ID is organised by SABAH.HUB Innovation Center, runs on two stages with 45 sessions, and passes are available through the official event site.
What will be demonstrated at the stand?
A live run of the full workflow: a batch of images is uploaded, each file receives a title, description and keywords written for how buyers search, the metadata is checked against the destination agency's rules, and the files are delivered over FTP or SFTP with status tracking. The Trends module and the Chrome extension will be shown as well.
Can I bring my own files to test?
Yes. Bring a small set of images on a USB stick and we will run them through the platform in front of you. That is the most useful kind of demo for both sides — it shows how the metadata reads on your actual subject matter rather than on a prepared sample.
Is Rastock AI meeting investors at Baku ID?
Yes. The company is raising a pre-seed round and both founders will be at the stand on both days. Investor meetings can be booked through Seeder, the matching platform used by Baku ID, or arranged directly at the stand. Rastock AI is backed by Microsoft for Startups, NVIDIA Inception and AWS Activate.
What if I cannot attend the event?
The platform is available online with a 14-day trial that needs no card. The trial covers 30 files through the complete workflow, including real delivery to a connected agency, so everything shown at the stand can be reproduced at home the same day.