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. Before iTogether, he spent years working as a Business Intelligence consultant — and, long before that, building some of the earliest community technology centers in rural Bangladesh.
Every program iTogether runs today — the training, the platform, the venture support — is a direct continuation of that early, hands-on work, now applied to what AI makes possible.
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.