Three Decades in the Making
iTogether didn't start with AI. It started with one person, a rural community, and a simple question about who technology actually gets built for.
Why We Exist
iTogether helps everyday people become the kind of entrepreneurs the world needs in the age of AI — founders who use these new tools not just to build profitable ventures, but to genuinely lift up the communities they come from.
We do that through training, mentorship, an affordable technology platform, and hands-on venture support — all built around a single idea: that trust, collaboration, and access have to be designed in from the start, not bolted on afterward.
Tariq Alam, Founder
Tariq Alam is the founder of iTogether and a social technology strategist with a Master's degree in Information Management from the University of Washington. His connection to the Grameen family of organizations goes back to 1998, when he served as Project Manager of the Village Computer and Internet Program in Madhupur, Bangladesh — working directly with Grameen Communications under the guidance of Grameen Bank founder and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus.
That connection never really ended. In 2025, Tariq returned to Grameen Communications in Bangladesh and volunteered a four-week virtual Data Visualization training program through his own training platform — the same hands-on, capacity-building instinct that now shapes iTogether's Entrepreneur Leadership Academy.
Every program iTogether runs today — the training, the platform, the venture support — is a direct continuation of that work, now applied to what AI makes possible.
Two of Tariq's own consultancies contribute the underlying technology at cost: the Capability Building Program runs on DEN Agentic AI's course platform, and the Innovation Enablement Platform is built on ApplyDataAI's Agentic Knowledge Engine. We disclose this openly because it's exactly the kind of relationship our own accountability framework asks every venture we support to be upfront about.
I started this career trying to bring basic technology to a village that had none. Three decades later, the tools are unrecognizable — but the question I started with hasn't changed: who is this actually for?
From One Village to a Global Network
iTogether is new. The experience behind it is not.
What Thirty Years Taught Us
A rural ICT center only works if the people who use it helped shape it. A telecentre only lasts if it can sustain itself, not just launch with a grant. Those are the same lessons behind our 9-Stage Manifestation Cycle, our emphasis on trust and collaboration, and the honest reporting we ask of every founder we support today.
AI didn't change what makes a venture worth building. It just made it possible for far more people to try — which is exactly why iTogether exists now.