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The one that appears, almost suddenly, to travellers who, climbing the slopes of Mount Ararat, come to see the valley that looks towards the east and the city that inhabits it, Yerevan, which is the name of the Armenian capital. A sort of apparition that is not content with the reflected light of the great mountain but does everything it can to shine with its own light, and does so by focusing decisively on innovation.
Innovation means talent, entrepreneurship, capital and success stories – all ingredients that are already well established in what we might call Armenia’s tech innovation ecosystem.
Meanwhile, we start with an awareness that everyone has, whether they are entrepreneurs, employees, investors, or people who have taken on important positions in multinational companies starting from this country of just under three million inhabitants: the main resources are minds, brains, education, and the availability of skills. Armenia has this and cultivates it at all levels, including young people, many of whom are girls, who study scientific subjects, perhaps at the prestigious French University of Yerevan, which acts as something of an academic beacon. Mari is busy studying applied mathematics and tells me about it as we visit the stands of the start-ups at Digitec, the trade fair that is being held for the twentieth time this year. Sophie is more business-oriented but still linked to cutting-edge fields, she tells me, reminding me that she speaks four languages: Armenian, French, English and Russian, and that she is studying a fifth, perhaps Spanish, perhaps Italian.
There is also attention and talent in the fields of management and communication, as reported by journalist Satenik Hakobyan, who is now the communications manager for one of the country’s most important tech companies, ServiceTitan. No less important is another large company founded in the country, perhaps the best known, the unicorn that represents the synthesis of the success that can be achieved through innovative entrepreneurship starting from Armenia: Picsart, with its 100 million users and its highly articulated offering, now integrated with artificial intelligence, is the tool of choice for digital content creators around the world. Picstart is somewhat the flagship of the Armenian ecosystem, having raised a $10 million Series A round in 2016 led by Sequoia and a subsequent $130 million round in 2021 with SoftBank as the lead investor.
The ecosystem striving for growth and stability
These are the most prominent parts of the iceberg that constitutes a highly dynamic ecosystem, which, as described by Grigor Hovhannisyan, president of BANA Angels and founder of venture capital firm Formula VC, has figures that translate into 20% year-on-year growth over the last 20 years, with almost 60,000 people working in the sector and scale-ups that have raised significant amounts of money such as the aforementioned ServiceTitan (total of $1.7 billion) and Picsart ($195 million), but also Codesignal ($87.5 million), Superannotate ($53.5 million), HerculesAI ($38.1 million), Gecko ($347 million), Disqo (£101.5 million), and Shopmonkey (£110 million), to name the most significant ones. “The tech market,” says Hovhannisyan, “was worth less than $20 million in Armenia in 2004. Twenty years later, in 2024, we have calculated that its impact on the country’s economy is estimated at over $2.5 billion.”
Startups continue to emerge and grow, with all Armenian startups based in Delaware and incorporated as C Corps. This is because, as the president of BANA explains, Armenia still has structural problems in the management of certain services, such as digital payments. “It is not purely a question of tax reasons or opportunities for attracting investors; there are practical reasons, and we, like other players in the ecosystem, are in constant contact with the Armenian government to find new solutions that can promote the development of the tech industry in the country.” There is no shortage of solutions. For example, on the investor side, there is certainly a structurally positive element, which is the non-existent taxation on capital gains: “The interesting thing is that if we have to set up start-ups in Delaware, it is in our interest to set up investment vehicles here, and this is something that our limited partners also like very much, considering that Formula VC now has investors from 15 different countries, including Italy, and after completing its first £7 million fund, it is now in the process of closing its second £30 million fund.”
Among the emerging start-ups, some stand out for their brilliant ideas, such as CoinStats, which allows users to monitor different crypto portfolios, Prodmap, which solves problems related to the contextualisation of artificial intelligence resources, Denovo Science, which uses AI to develop new synthetic molecules, and 10Web, which rides the hype of vibe coding, i.e. AI-driven programming that does not require knowledge of code, and compares itself with the best-known international scaleups in the sector, such as Sweden’s Lovable and America’s Replit.
Zaven Naghashyan, director and founder of Naghashyan Solutions, a software development boutique that has grown over time to around 50 people and developing tech platforms such as one that allows music to be played in public venues across the country, confirms that the sector is growing at a rapid pace, which not only has a very positive impact on the country’s entire economy but also leads to higher wages and a better standard of living: ‘Today, a software programmer in Armenia does not earn much less than one in another European country. What makes the difference here is the high availability of high-profile talent’.
Training and opportunities for talented individuals
Talents who are also at the heart of another Armenian-born project that is rapidly expanding across half the world, a project that is not a business but conceptually overturns the approach to technical training by targeting both young people and those entering the world of work. It is called Tumo – Centre for Creative Technologies is a veritable talent factory. Tumo offers free training, mainly to teenagers, has workshops for developing creativity, and started in Yerevan before spreading to many other locations across the country. such as Dilijan, Koghb, Gyumri, Yeghegnadzor, Kapan and around the world such as Paris, Marseille, Lyon in France, Tirana in Albania, Berlin, Mannheim, Hirschaid, Lüdenscheid in Germany, Coimbra, Lisbon in Portugal, Buenos Aires in Argentina, Gunma in Japan.
Tumo is a multifaceted project that also includes Tumo Labs and Tumo Studios, because training is essential, but so are the tools to express creativity and give strength and substance to ideas. Tumo is a non-profit initiative founded in 2011 in the Armenian capital by Sam and Sylva Simonian, who finance the project through their Simonian Educational Foundation.
The event and technologies in schools
If talent is the key to Armenia’s future and Tumo is perhaps the most impactful project in this regard, no less important is the role of UATE, the Union of Advanced Technology Enterprises, which, as CEO Sargis Karapetyan explains, is carrying out two major projects, Digitec and Armath: “This year marks the 25th anniversary of UATE and the 20th anniversary of Digtec, our flagship event. We are a non-profit organisation with 257 members representing 75% of the entire value of the Armenian ICT industry, which today accounts for about 7.6% of the country’s total GDP.”
UATE employs 650 people and, together with Digitec, brings together the best of the country’s innovation every year. The event lasts three days and is visited by 40,000 people: “At the weekend, there are also many families who come from outside Yerevan with their children because they want to introduce them to the wonders of technology and innovation. Today, Armenian parents tend to push their children towards scientific subjects because that is where the future of the country lies,” says Garegin Khumaryan, who is responsible for UATE’s communication and external relations activities.
UATE is also committed to education: “Our most important programme is Armath, which is both a blend of the words Armenia and mathematics and the translation of the word ‘root’ into Armenian. It is a programme to bring engineering and technology education to schools, which now involves around 17,000 students and is expanding beyond the country’s borders. This is our most important programme, and we organise Digitec with the ultimate aim of promoting Armath. Digitec is the channel we use to highlight the importance of the future and the fact that everything of value we have lies in our talents and the younger generations,” adds Karapetyan.
Armenia is thus taking on a new form, giving us a glimpse of its momentum towards the future, the product of a very troubled past, even recent, of a history that has forced migration around the world, of a diaspora scattered across five continents, of a country with less than three million inhabitants investing in itself to emerge and carve out its own unique personality that countries with a troubled past have, a personality that, if it were music, would be a song by Charles Aznavour, the famous French-Armenian singer, perhaps the country’s most famous son. Armenia also invests courageously in technology, a courage that looks to the most stimulating and promising frontier: artificial intelligence and its most daring applications: physical AI and AI applied to science.
Physical AI and scientific AI
This is where a figure comes into play who strengthens Armenian pride around the world, particularly in the world of technology. His name is Rev Lebaredian, vice president of Omniverse and simulation technology at NVIDIA. Rev is brilliant and has a strong intuition about the future of artificial intelligence. “AI is a big deal,” he says, “capable of changing everything just as the advent of electricity did in the past, and just as infrastructure was built in the past to produce and distribute electricity.” Today, countries must build the so-called foundation layers for AI. They all have to do it, and we at NVIDIA are supporting these strategies. We are doing it here in Armenia with the construction of sophisticated data centres that enjoy unique geographical conditions for location, power supply and cooling, and we want to do it with any other country. Our CEO Jensen Huang was recently in the United Kingdom to discuss this, for example, but we are also in talks with many others, including Germany, France, the European Union and many global and local companies that want to participate in the implementation of Nscale projects (which are full-stack cloud platforms for AI and high-performance computing that Nvidia builds using its own and third-party technologies, ed.).
Today, national governments are increasingly aware of the need to develop this infrastructure: “Governments come to us with land, power supply capacity and their local tech companies, and together we develop projects. It is a question of building infrastructure that should be considered on a par with roads, bridges or airports. It is essential for the future, for technological sovereignty, for international relations and for economic development.”
This approach is structural, it changes the world and will continue to change it even more in light of the fact that the AI we have seen to date is only the beginning of a revolutionary process that is developing from the so-called physical AI in which Lbaredian is an expert: “Until now, we have used data already available on the network to train generative artificial intelligence, but now, with physical AI, we need data that is not already available, that is not already online. It must be collected; we must bring the physical world into a digital format, and we can only do this with simulation systems. which are also used to carry out control simulations before making new systems available. Based on physical AI, these systems can have a profound impact on the world, so we need to be sure that everything works well, and this is where simulation systems become fundamental again. This is useful in many fields, such as industry, infrastructure support, logistics and even scientific research, which is another fascinating and emerging field.
In his keynote speech at Digitec, Noubar Afeyan, founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering and co-founder and chairman of Moderna Therapeutics, illustrate how AI and science will change the world of research, using collective intelligence systems, generative biomedicine, which represents the development of the era of programmable biology that began in 2018, and scientific superintelligences based on the concept of generative AI capable of extracting new value from what human intelligences already know in order to develop autonomous science systems, scientific AI factories capable of exponentially accelerating research processes in fields such as chemistry or biology.
Frontiers, therefore, the frontiers of technology, the frontiers of scientific research, the frontiers that lead to the new and to new challenges that must be viewed with attention and hope for the future. In this way, we must heal the developments in artificial intelligence and the way in which the society and economy of countries such as Armenia are developing. (The photo shows a view of Yerevan with Mount Ararat in the background).
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