Back on October 1, the third cycle of the 12-week pre-acceleration program of the Armenia Startup Academy was launched and 17 startups have been selected to participate in a unique and highly informative 3-month Academy tailored for high-tech companies and startups based on best international experiences and models from the Silicon Valley.
“Armenia is a great place to live a meaningful life: you can create solid things of the future and meanwhile enjoy every second. This joy comes from being part of a vibrant community. Today 12 startups will present their companies. Together with many of them we achieved some remarkable results. One of the companies finalized their huge IP that accelerates computing for some highly demanded operations. We have companies in AI, Robotics, Healthcare, Crypto, IoT and all of them with huge potential.” said Ashot Arzumanyan, co-founder of SmartGateVC and the Catalyst Foundation in his welcome address to guests of the third Demo Day of the Armenia Startup Academy.
“We are really excited to partner with these initiatives, Hero House and Armenia Startup Academy and we believe that results will speak of themselves. More than 50 startups have graduated from the program and we think that’s a huge success. European Union has supported the Armenian startup ecosystem for the last couple of years and we have seen a lot of great results. We are proud to stand by the startups and initiatives here.” said Stanislav Toshkov, International Aid/Cooperation Officer of EU Delegation in Armenia.
“Our project is blessed to work in Armenia. What is happening here, the flexibility, the dynamics are really really great. A lot of time in developing countries that is not the case. This is due to the players in the ecosystem among them Hero House and Catalyst Foundation, our partners. We started to work together around two years ago and we saw the dedication and approach of professionalism and approach of trying to be a change maker not only for their projects but also for the whole.” said Peer Priewich, Technical Advisor at GIZ in his welcome address.
Armine Galstyan, Program Director of Armenia Startup Academy made highlights about the initiatives of the Foundation, including the Hero House, Armenia Startup Academy, Gate42 Quantum Computing research lab, YLedger Consortium of Blockchain Developers and others.
The co-founder of ForgeFiction, the graduate of Armenia Startup Academy second batch presented their achievements and the progress they had since their Demo Day on May 30, 2018.
“Our journey to startup world started 1 year ago when we first stepped into Hero House. We had very little knowledge about startups but we carried the best ambitions. Armenia Startup Academy and the people behind the program helped us to realize some of those and played a huge role in the achievements we have today.” said Areg Vardanyan, the co-founder of ForgeFiction.
About 13 graduated startups
Risksensor is an all-in-one financial risk management toolset concentrated on operational and market risk management automation for retail traders earning speculative income. Technology utilizing artificial intelligence and big data technologies. Currently, there are at least 4mln active traders globally.The CEO of the company has over 8 years of experience in Big4 audit companies and CTO has 15+years of experience in multinational tech companies. The founders themselves invested $90k and got another $15k of grant financing.The company plans to have a beta release and the first paying customer in Q3 2019. Also see the blog post by Enterprise Incubation Foundation.
AnteoHealth is a digital healthcare service that improves primary care access and remotely delivers treatment programs. It allows to arrange a virtual consultation, match a personalized treatment program, progress with your treatment and get ongoing support from the care team. The company released it's MVP back in October and is currently generating revenue. Anteo is running a pilot program in NY with 10+ doctors and 50+ patients. Co-founder and CEO have 15+ years of experience in Healthcare and CTO has 10+ years of experience of engineering in international companies. The company is raising seed funding of $170k.
Petto is an AI assistant that creates a connection between the human and house plant by allowing the plants to send messages and notifications to the plant owner via a mobile app. The device has all the necessary sensors to measure temperature and humidity, soil moisture, solar intensity and can provide full info on plant conditions. The market is $9 billion and 400 million houseplants were sold in 2017 by FloraHolland, the biggest plant exporter in the world. Petto is planning to release the first MVP in April 2019 and launch a crowdfunding campaign in May. The team has 10+ years of experience in the product related fields including AI, Mobile development and design. Also see the article by VNews.
IMPEL-H1 Heart Monitoring System is a set of algorithms that monitors human cardiovascular system using highly accurate algorithms and software to track the results. This patentable technology improves the accuracy of heartbeat detection for up to 99,9%. MVP and application for Patenting of the technology are planned to be on March 2019. The founders anticipate to apply for the FDA clearance in May 2019 and get the validation of the software as a medical device in December 2019. The target customers of the company are healthcare organizations, smart hospitals, medical equipment, and mobile healthcare device providers, as well as pharmaceutics companies for tracking and real-time evaluation of their therapies using the proposed technology. The co-founders have 5+ years of experience in implementing ML and AI-based scientific medical projects for international corporations.
illuria security is cyber deception automation and threat intelligence startup, whose flagship platform reduces risk and vulnerability by detecting and tracking malicious network and application traffic .The team has developed a proprietary, undetectable tracing method, coupled with a novel orchestration and resource isolation methodology, to be patented in the upcoming year. The potential market for the product is already huge (and continues to grow annually), amounting to over $500M. The target market is global, and includes ISPs/Telecoms, Financial institutions, Medical institutions, security-sensitive research institutions, Defense/Military organizations, Government infrastructures, Data Centers, and Cloud Providers.
The CEO of the company has 6+ years of experience as a cybersecurity expert, working for Armenia’s National Computer Emergency Response Team and for a company that was acquired by Facebook. The co-founder/CSO has over 10 years of experience in Engineering, Security, Genomics, NeuroTech, Compliance Auditing (PCI, HIPAA, SOC, ISO) and Technical Leadership. The third co-founder has spent the last 3 years as a penetration testing and network security professional.Currently the team is negotiating with leading Armenia startups for alpha testing. Also see the publication by StartHub Armenia.
Robin by Expper Technologies is a business assistant robot powered by ML allowing to rapidly analyze and support real-time conversations with the customers. The market of service robots is predicted to be $27 billion in 2022. The target market group is the main operators of service sector, such as banks, hotels, shopping malls, airports, medical centers etc. The company received $15k grant funding last month and is planning to release the first MVP in the next 3 months for the customers in the Armenian market. The CEO and CTO have 5+ years of experience in Hardware Design and Electrical Engineering, Software Architect has 7+ years in Software Design and ML experience from multinational companies such as Synopsys. Also see the interview by Ararat TV.
EasyDMARC is smart and easy DMARC deployment, reporting and alerting service to make the sent email trusted and maximize the security of your domain and emails. DMARC is an email authentication system and an industry standard. There are over 280mln registered domains globally and only 5.2 mln of them have DMARC. The company has 549 customers and is generating revenue. The co-founder and CEO have 15+ years experience of DevOps engineering. CTO of the company has 10+ years of experience as a software engineer.
RetentionForce is marketing automation and CRM toolset designed specifically for beauty salon needs. It is the only solution that specifically solves beauty salon needs using conversational technologies. The company closed deals with 10+ beauty salons from Yerevan and served over 5000 salon customers. The founder has 14 years of experience in Engineering and Business operation and has previously founded 3 successful companies.
Puzl is a robot-ready intelligence for retail robots automating product sorting. It is AI platform as a service for robots, which contains well categorized, 360-degree visuals of all supermarket products. Retail robot market is around $20bln and is expected to reach $51 bln by 2028. The company currently has 13 member team of engineers based in Armenia. The CEO of the company has 20+ years of global strategy experience in multinationals including Coca-Cola, Unilever, P&G and others. Currently, the company is negotiating with the first customer to start the testing in the US market.
Altered Silicon, where Supercomputing meets crypto mining. Altered Silicon offers Computing for rental. It allows mining when HW accelerators are idle thanks to the unique mining IPs developed in house. As a result, expensive HW accelerators are generating revenue 24/7. The market for CaaS is over 8.5 bln and is growing with 25% yearly. The CEO of the company is an ex-Microsoft Software Engineer and a Mining Pioneer. He was a founder of several successful cryptocurrency, blockchain and mining startups. The CTO holds MSc in System on Chip Design from KTH, Sweden and has 10+ years of experience in FPGA, ASIC development technologies. Also see the publication at Newswire.
Advanced Filtering Systems is a cell sorting system which allows to filter blood and other liquids and extract only desired particles. The patentable technology uses a high-speed camera to grab the image of particles and uses deep convolutional neural network algorithms to perform particle or cell automatic recognition and sorting. The market of cell sorters is expected to reach $247.4 mln by the end of 2020. The founding team members have 20+ years of experience as a hardware engineer in multinationals such as National Instruments and Synopsys and have implemented remarkable engineering projects globally. The company will have first functional hardware prototype by the end of June and is raising $60k for product and business development.
DOhirus is a platform that brings together those seeking short term jobs/tasks to people looking to hire. It profiles industry professionals and puts them on a map where users can find them and highlights their talent as well as reliability through ratings and reviews. Service providers can then work in an unpressured, obligation-free environment, without the restraints of a 9:00-5:00 job.
DOhirus will launch the beta version by the end of January 2019. The target markets are the countries in the Caucasus where this kind of platforms are not yet available.
The global market is $1.5 trillion. There are 57.3 million freelancers in the US only. The expected growth of the market by 2020 is 10%. The co-founders have experience in software development and digital startup growth for multi-million dollar companies in the Caucasus, Silicon Valley, and the MENA.
CryptoNDX is a crypto registry on a mission to make the cryptomarket data-driven instead of hype-driven. Our registry centralizes, analyzes, and visualizes cryptomarket information so it is more accessible to the public. We provide technological, economic and security insights on the market, which saves hours of research and integrations before concluding a comprehensive overview of the market.
Congratulations to the Armenia Startup Academy Fall 2018 Batch!
About the Armenia Startup Academy The Armenia Startup Academy is a Catalyst Foundation project implemented in the framework of the Support to SME Development in Armenia (EU-SMEDA) Project, which is co-funded by the European Union and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and implemented by the German Development Cooperation GIZ through the Private Sector Development in South Caucasus Programme, within the EU4Business and EU4Innovation initiatives.
Throughout the 3 cycles of the program, 52 startups and 121 entrepreneurs were involved. They benefited from more than 400 one-on-one meetings, 115 sessions, workshops, business breakfasts and dinners with 60+ high profile professionals and mentors spanning from Australia to Europe and Silicon Valley. During last year the program graduates raised over $500K of funding from different financing sources.