🇦🇲🦊 Three reasons why Armenia can become a booming start-up and R&D landscape
Curated resources for Armenian founders and tech enthusiasts.
Armenia is becoming the home to a booming start-up community due to a combination of solid infrastructure combined with an entrepreneurial, risk-taking culture that is driving growth in the scene. Here we break down the three reasons why Armenia can become a booming start-up and R&D landscape.👇
With a population of only three million, Armenia is home to over 500 startups. Clustered mostly in the country’s business capital of Yerevan, Armenia’s premier tech startups include ServiceTitan, Krips, PicsArt, ggTaxi, and many more.
These strengths look to set Armenia up for current and future startups’ success, including its educated workforce, the strong innovative technology sector, and government policy.
Educated workforce
Since Armenia mostly lacks any natural resources, the country has worked hard to create a strong base of human capital. On the brighter side, Armenia pays great attention to education with children getting through chess on top of their classwork from an early age to try and stimulate their thinking from a strategy point of view.
The country needs to invest heavily in tertiary education. It currently ranks in the top 50 countries in engineers per capita and needs to make an emphasis on it going forward. Taking a page out of competitive countries’ playbook of startup success, Armenia needs to focus on its education network including schools, universities, and centrally, the military. Students in the education system need to become experts in specific fields like engineering and technology, depending on their strengths.
Every year ~2,000 students graduate in tech-related fields. The current tech workforce is around ~20,000. One of the unique characteristics of the Armenian tech sector is the high percentage of women (45%+) in tech which is greater than the global average of 19%. Armenian women are full-fledged participants of the tech sector involved in all departments, from marketing to programming, and QA. This proves that Armenia can become a leader in bridging the gender gap in the male-dominated sector.
Government policy
The Armenian government has created a supportive framework for new businesses. The government has been proactive in supporting entrepreneurship with tech startups receiving tax incentives of 0% income tax and 10% flat payroll tax. They need to also create policy initiatives such as extensive R&D support programs, marketing, and other tax-reduction frameworks.
Armenia’s current research and development investments as a share of GDP of 0.2% in 2019 need to increase to compete with the likes of other major countries looking to grow their startup ecosystem. (Example: Israel is at the top of the list with 4.9% as a % of GDP).
According to the World Bank Doing Business research, which is held in 190 countries, Armenia is ranked 10th in terms of ease of starting a business, and 13th in terms of speed, simplicity, and cost of registering property.
Growing technology sector
Multinationals such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Cisco, Ericsson, and Huawei have been in Armenia for many years. With a growing technology sector, the country should also look to put a strong emphasis on high-tech goods to increase its manufacturing exports.
Although the technology sector is growing, there still are some main challenges in the ecosystem. The main gap in the labor market is the lack of senior talent. This refers to both technical and soft skills. The government could help by getting companies to relocate operations in the region with tax breaks and office spaces, inviting guest speakers from top tech companies to join university lectures and run practical sessions while involving top experts from leading tech hubs in entrepreneurial education programs throughout the year. This will assure the entrepreneurs have access to networks and knowledge outside of Armenia and will ease their entry to those hubs.
Armenian Tech News 📣
📝 Dowork.ai launched on Product Hunt which helps you estimate a project's timeline scope, costs, and beyond. + SmartGateVC leads Dowork.ai’s pre-seed round.
🚨 Todd Fabacher, co-founder of Digital Pomegranate, is building a project, called Distrikt, which will regenerate an old military base and use it as a space for a start-up hub, a solar farm, and other initiatives in Armenia’s second-largest city, Gyumri.
🎙 Armenian startup, Podcastle, was also featured on Product Hunt in May and became the #2 product of the day. Podcastle is an AI-powered audio creation platform, which helps podcasters, bloggers, journalists, content marketers, educators, and other content creators convert their text to audio.
📈 Synergy Academy is organizing a free programming course at Synergy Gyumri Branch. The deadline for filling out the entrance exam applications is June 10. Apply here
🏆 Krisp won the 'Internet Oscar' in the Webby Awards in the category of efficiency applications while Arloopa passed 2,000,000 downloads!
💰 Binance has now added new banks to the list of payment methods for buying and selling cryptocurrencies and now supports and accepts Armenian Dram!
What we’re following 🚀
A masterclass on Visa — history, its role globally, why it works the way it does & geopolitical implications by Alex Rampell with Patrick OShaughnessy.
Patrick Rivera's Crypto fundamentals and NFTs deck. No one is better at explaining crypto to non-crypto people.
List of 200+ female investors/VCs in Europe!
The Enterprise Incubator Foundation announced a design competition for a second-floor parking lot on the main entrance to the Engineering City. The competition is open to individuals - students, individual architects - groups, legal entities - architectural design organizations. The prize is 500,000 AMD. Submit your designs by June 8!
Jobs 💼
Grovf is looking to hire a Senior Software Engineer in Armenia.
Role description here.
Krisp is looking for a Senior Product Manager
Kubevious is looking for a front-end developer for a full-time position to help with an open-source project and a SaaS service. If interested, reach out directly to the founder!
International Armenian Job Board.
Post your Jobs here
Startup spotlight 👨💻👩💻
Shopmonkey, founded in 2016 by Ashot Iskandarian and headquartered in San Jose, California, provides process management software designed for auto repair shops. The platform eliminates double entry and avoids missing unpaid invoices by tracking everything payment-related in one shop management system. It integrates with Quickbooks and offers customers the ability to pay in-person or online. The company has raised $35M+ from top Venture Capitalists such as Bessemer Venture Partners and Index Ventures. Shopmonkey utilizes built-in tools to communicate with customers via text and email. It enables users to send automated appointment confirmations and reminders, share invoices, inspection sheets, collect payments or answer questions with just a few clicks.
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