🇦🇲🦊 Celebrating Armenian Women in Tech!
Curated resources for Armenian founders and tech enthusiasts.
Welcome to all the new members of the Hye Ventures Crew. Our mission is simple. Accelerating the success of Armenian founders and funders to build a more prosperous, equitable future. Subscribe today to join early-stage founders, funders, and operators, as well as enthusiasts of the Armenian tech community, and get coverage on recent news directly in your inbox.👇
Thanks for reading Hye Ventures! Subscribe to receive new posts directly in your inbox if you haven’t done it yet!
On March 8th, we celebrated Women’s Day. One thing that is noticeable in Armenian startups is the role women play in the Armenian technology market. Everywhere you go, you meet highly-educated and hard-working female developers, senior specialists, marketers, investors, operators, and more. It’s promising that Armenian women participate in positions mainly dominated by men worldwide. Around 40%+ of the Armenian Tech workforce is made out of women. On average women makeup, 34% of startup employees around the world while representing 13% of startup founders. Here’s a graph showing the distribution of the women workforce in Big Tech Companies. Armenia should become an example of how other countries and tech hubs create equitable environments to foster a diverse and equal workforce. This fact should be used to inspire school children to jump into the fast-paced tech sector through different educational programs. Big shoutout to all the outstanding women building the future in Armenia and abroad!
On a similar note, IFC just unveiled a new initiative to drive investments for women entrepreneurs in Armenia. The program will help improve access to finance for women-owned businesses, unlocking their full potential and enabling greater participation of women in the country's economy! Looking forward to seeing more companies get founded by amazing women founders in the near future!
Armenian Tech News 📣
🤖 Karén Simonyan, one of the most accomplished deep learning leaders of his generation, will be the Chief Scientist and co-founder of InflectionAI. Reid Hoffman will be serving on Inflection's board. Read more about it here!
🚀 Congratulations to ZERO on raising their Series A! Professional Services such as law firms, consulting, and financial services have many dreary manual tasks that can use automation and that's where they come in!
🏥 10X Immersive which develops Virtual Reality products that are going to be used in medical procedures aiming to decrease children’s acute pain and stress just raised their pre-seed round!
📚 Electives, a Boston, MA-based provider of a marketplace that collects data for teachers and enables companies to facilitate live learning with proven teachers, closed an $8m Series A funding.
💸 LayerSwap, based in Armenia, has attracted $ 1.5 million in pre-seed investment from leading crypto companies (StarkWare, Argent, ImToken, zkSync) amongst other VCs.
🦄 Founder Institute Opens Applications for Entrepreneurs Across South Caucasus for the first time and invites any aspiring entrepreneurs interested in building a company with some of Armenia’s and Georgia’s top startup mentors to participate in the program remotely. Early Admission deadline is April 3rd: Apply today!
🏆 DISQO, ServiceTitan, and Picsart were recognized as one of America's Best Startup Employers in 2022 by Forbes.
✏️ Applications for the third batch of HyeTech Entrepreneur Immersion Program (EIP) are open - a 10-day intensive program providing 10-12 early-stage startup founders exposure to the opportunities in Silicon Valley & Los Angeles. The application deadline is the 15th of April. See here for more details!
🛫 Armenia Tech Trip with HeroHouse. Join 15 young professionals this summer to explore Armenia's tech and startup ecosystem. Apply by April 21st
👨🏫 Artur Manukyan started a Series of “Tech for Non-Tech” courses at Armenian Code Academy designed for product/project managers, technical recruiters, entrepreneurs looking to better understand the tech world. Check it out!
What we’re following 🚀
Entrepreneurship:
Learn Company Design, the Sequoia way to start, build and scale enduring companies. Meet fellow founders, experienced operators, and an exceptional community who will help elevate your game. Apply to Arc Europe ’22 cohort.
How to raise a seed round by Elizabeth Yin
Lessons For Product Leaders & Build (and Evaluate) Your Startup’s Culture by First Round
Product Manager Stack 2022 surveyed by Lenny Rachitsky
Warning Email about the new Macro-environment for founders and CEOs by Darian Shirazi
Angel List launched their own Angel Directory → Take a look
PartyRound built a Twitter hiring tool for founders. Enter any handle and turn their followers into a list of candidate profiles.
A crash course on comms for founders — Nairi Hourdajian’s early-stage advice from Figma & Uber
Crypto / Web 3.0:
The App Store Model Comes to Web3 by Tomasz Tunguz
Web3’s Mobile Moment by Gaby Goldberg
Web3 Landscape:
The Unbundling of Opensea by Tasha Kim
Meet me in the metaverse by Accenture
Jobs 💼
Electives, which recently raised their Series A, added two new roles to their job board, a Lead UX designer and a Lead DevOps Engineer. Take a look at their jobs!
Expper Technologies is expanding its team and looking to fill the following roles: Head of Sales and Head of Operations. Apply today!
EasyDMARC is looking for a US-based Sales Director. Reach out to me if you are interested
CoinStats is looking for a Product Marketer. The role could be filled remotely.
Startup spotlight 👨💻👩💻
Gabby, founded by Vacheh Sahakian, Aram Manoukian, and Narek Manukyan, is a recently launched social media platform that allows all dog people to connect by sharing photos and stories of their dogs and creating matches. Follow other dogs’ daily adventures, socialize with your friends, share your dog’s updates on Gabby, comment, add stories and make new connections. It also allows you to track your furry friend’s health in terms of daily calories intake, weight, calorie burn, vaccinations, behavioral patterns, etc. Check them out!
Exciting News: You can now read Hye Ventures in the new Substack app for iPhone.
With the app, you’ll have a dedicated Inbox for my newsletter and any others you subscribe to. New posts will never get lost in your email filters or stuck in spam. The Substack app is currently available for iOS. If you don’t have an Apple device, you can join the Android waitlist here.
If you liked what you read, and have not subscribed yet, do so below with 1 click :)
Hi! 👋 Thanks for reading Hye Ventures Newsletter. We’d love your feedback - feel free to tweet us @hyeventures or email us at noubar@hye.vc. If you found this newsletter helpful, share it with friends.