Turning Frontier Science into Companies

• Can you share your career journey and the key experiences that influenced your philosophy and led you to your role at SmartGateVC?

Venture capital is about asymmetry. To succeed, you must find the rare advantages in sourcing, selecting, and exiting companies. My own path began in investment advisory and consulting. However, I was drawn to startups—where learning is fast, growth is exponential, work is challenging, horizons are vast, and trust is the foundation of everything.

Over time, I learned to catch waves early. In 2018, we began investing in AI, well before it became a mainstream venture story. That early positioning now places our first fund among the top 10 percent of U.S. venture funds. Today, we are positioning around the next wave: Physical AI, brain–computer interfaces, and cybersecurity.

Alongside timing, we rely on structural edges. Geography gives us Armenia as a powerhouse for deep R&D, Southern California as the launchpad for customers and capital, and the Armenian diaspora as a global reference network. Community gives us the Hero House hubs in Glendale and Yerevan, which serve as bridges where founders, scientists, and operators can collaborate across ecosystems.

The philosophy is consistent: anticipate the wave, compress the time to validation for founders, and surround science-driven entrepreneurs with the networks they need to turn research into global companies.

• How would you describe your leadership style when guiding founders working in uncharted territory like Physical AI and brain-computer interfaces?

My philosophy is best captured by the motto we coined when starting SmartGateVC: capable, unstoppable, unbreakable. In startups, the chain is not as strong as its weakest link – it is as strong as its strongest link. A single founder’s focus, resilience, and learning velocity can carry a company through obstacles that would sink others.

I push founders to commit fully. Cross the Rubicon. If they keep a backup plan, investors, employees, and customers will sense it. Full focus and commitment are the non-negotiable starting point.

  ​I push founders to commit fully. Cross the Rubicon. If they keep a backup plan, investors, employees, and customers will sense it. Full focus and commitment are the nonnegotiable starting point  

The next pillar is technical depth paired with agility. In areas like Physical AI or brain-computer interfaces, science may be the entry ticket. However, success comes from the ability to adapt: to take harsh feedback, pivot architectures, or re-sequence milestones without losing momentum.

Finally, I emphasize building the execution machine early. Breakthrough IP without execution is worth little – company building requires prioritization, the right early hires, and trusted partners who extend the founder’s skills. My role is to help identify gaps, bring the right people to the table, and keep the team moving with speed and discipline.

My leadership style focuses on reinforcing capability, relentlessness, and resilience. When founders embody these traits, the odds of turning frontier science into enduring companies rise dramatically.

• You’ve invested in companies like Super Annotate and Deep Origin well before broader recognition. What patterns did you see in those founders or technologies that convinced you they could succeed?

Companies spinning out from KTH, Harvard, Princeton, Maryland, Cambridge, Temple, EPFL, and teams from Meta, Synopsys, and National Instruments are part of our portfolio today. In many cases, we were the first investor—such as with SuperAnnotate and Biosim, which later merged with Deep Origin.

In deep tech, the first question is always: if there are only five to ten teams in the world that can solve this problem, is this one of them? If yes, the decision rests on the founders’ character—their ability to adapt, sense change, and execute under pressure.

With SuperAnnotate, what impressed us was not only Vahan Petrosyan’s PhD thesis at KTH, which introduced pixel-precise annotation, but also how he and his brother built the company. They were agile, quick to internalize customer feedback, and unafraid to reinvent. Today, NVIDIA and Fortune 50 companies trust their solution, which no longer even uses the original algorithm.

With Biosim, later merged with Deep Origin, our conviction came from Professor Garegin Papoian at Maryland. His lab excelled in computational chemistry, but what set him apart was his openness and vision—qualities that enabled a merger with Michael Antonov’s Deep Origin, uniting science and company-building.

• With a footprint across California and Armenia, how does SmartGateVC leverage geography to connect deep-tech ecosystems and create opportunities for startups?

We start in California and the wider U.S., as well as Western Europe, where world-class universities, enterprises, and capital make it the best place to validate frontier technologies. From there, where needed, we connect founders to Armenia, which provides the deep R&D capacity to build fast and cost-effectively. The Hero House hubs in Glendale and Yerevan make this bridge tangible, while the Armenian diaspora extends it across the U.S. market.

Our portfolio shows how it works in practice. Krisp delivers AI-powered noise cancellation and is trusted by millions of users worldwide, including Fortune 100 enterprises. Podcastle builds an AI-driven media creation platform and is now used by leading media voices globally. Modelfront advances machine translation quality prediction with a global go-to-market strategy and is recognized as best in class. Grovf develops data center acceleration technologies, including ultra-low-latency RDMA and near-memory computing, with performance comparable to that of NVIDIA. All of these companies maintain R&D facilities in Armenia, with Krisp and Grovf also operating dedicated labs at Yerevan State University, which serve as talent pipelines.

This cross-border structure enables founders to validate in the U.S. while scaling engineering in Armenia, providing them with a speed and efficiency advantage that is repeated across our portfolio.

• If you had one piece of advice for founders working at the bleeding edge of science and technology, what would it be?

In deep tech, company building is multiplicative, not additive. Intellectual property multiplied by execution equals value; anything multiplied by zero is still zero. A hundred patents without execution are worthless, and flawless execution without a scientific moat is equally worthless. Both must be strong, or the venture collapses.

Most scientists underestimate execution. The life of a deeptech founder is not only that of an inventor but also that of a builder who fills gaps through people. Skills you lack personally must be offset by those you bring into your orbit. The strongest teams secure experienced partners and advisors who lend trust, open doors, and transfer knowledge that would otherwise take years to build. Without those allies, even the best science risks staying locked in the lab.

Execution also means structuring the journey around minimum viable milestones rather than chasing the complete vision immediately. Each stage must be resourced to reach a clear validation point — a prototype in robotics, an FDA pre-submission in neurotech, or proof-of-concept in computational biology. Raising just enough to get halfway is a trap; you need capital and focus to cross the finish line.

So my advice: don’t think only as a scientist with IP. Think of yourself as a company builder who multiplies that IP with relentless execution and the right allies beside you.