From Silicon Valley to Armenia: HIVE Ventures hosts its 4th tech conference in Yerevan

On October 13, HIVE Ventures hosted its fourth annual Tech Summit: Hacking Silicon Valley at the TUMO Center for Creative Technologies in Yerevan.

HIVE’s mission is to be a bridge between Armenia and Silicon Valley and giving Armenian startups access to tech leaders is key.

This year, the Tech Summit welcomed speakers such as Partner at Y Combinator Geoff Ralston, who told the attendees how to apply for their accelerator. Ilya Fushman, General Partner at Kleiner Perkins, spent one-on-one time with several startups and said, “I was blown away by the technical breadth and the ambition of Armenian founders to build global companies.”

Other participants of panel discussions were Afeef Ahmad (Amazon), Razmig Hovaghimian (Hoodline), TJ Nahigian (Base10VC), Jake Loosararian (Gecko Robotics), Magdalena Yesil (Drive Informed), David Selverian (Bessemer Venture Partners), Moniza Masud (Pinterest), Ilya Golubovich (I2F Global Ventures), Vijay Pandurangan (Benchmark), and Andee Gardiner (Founders Embassy).

ServiceTitan cofounders Vahe Kuzoyan and Ara Mahdessian shared with the audience how they created their company.

HIVE Ventures founder Nina Achadjian told Itel.am she was excited to watch Armenian IT ecosystem develop year by year.

“We’ve made some great investments in the last couple of months, including Service Titan, Gecko Robotics, Ourmenu and Shopmonkey. We are currently helping ServiceTitan evaluate opening a large engineering office in Armenia. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be a founder in Yerevan”, said Nina Achadjian, adding that the changes she saw Armenia go through this year are inspiring.

The summit concluded with a HIVE Ventures pitching event, which involved six Armenian startups: Breedge, FaceHub, noomie, TripPlannera, oores, and SuperAnnotate AI. The latter came out the winner and received USD 25,000 investment from HIVE Ventures.

Narine Daneghyan