AIA Kutaisi

Three straight Soviet championships, in 1987, 1988 and 1989, came under a coach named Douglas Kavtelaishvili, who took a factory side from Kutaisi to the top of a competition contested across the whole USSR. That run also brought two Soviet cups and, before it, five Georgian Soviet titles through the 1970s and 1980s, so the late-1980s peak sat on top of a side that had already been winning locally for years.

The club started life at a leather and footwear factory in Kutaisi in 1967, founded by Giorgi Kuparadze, and for its first years carried the plain industrial name DSK. It became Stroitel in the mid-1980s and only took the name Aia in 1989, borrowed from Aea, the ancient Greek name for the city.

Independence brought Georgian championships in 1990, 1991 and 1995, then a long gap before the club returned to the top in 2020–21 and again in 2023–24. In between, Aia finished runners-up in the Georgia Cup twice, in 1991–92 and 2006, without adding the trophy itself. Their contests for the title have mostly run through Lelo Saracens and Batumi.

Red and green have stayed the club's colours through all the name changes, and since 2016 the French group Altrad has backed the club, a partnership that runs alongside Aia's own habit of feeding players through to Black Lion on dual registration.