Tigran Petrosyan, CEO SuperAnnotate

Tigran Petrosyan, CEO & Vahan Petrosyan, CTO

SuperAnnotate: Driving innovation from Sevan to Silicon Valley

In the last decade, machine learning has become ubiquitous.

A branch of artificial intelligence that uses data and algorithms to imitate the way that people learn, machine learning is the technology that determines what posts come up on your Facebook timeline and what shows Netflix suggests you binge-watch next.

“Probably the easiest machine learning application to think about is autonomous vehicles, like Teslas. They have cameras that identify where the lanes are, where the other cars and trees and street lights are, what color a traffic light is,” explains Tigran Petrosyan.

In mid-2018, Tigran and his brother Vahan realized that an algorithm Vahan was developing could help automate parts of the process that captures and labels data to enable machine learning — and had the potential to change the course of their lives.

The brothers brought their idea to Armenia’s Sevan Startup Summit, a yearly competition co-organized by Granatus Ventures, and won.

“We spotted the strength of the team and decided to invest,” says Granatus co-founder and managing partner Manuk Hergnyan.

Shortly after that, Tigran and Vahan dropped out of their Ph.D. programs, moved back to Yerevan, and began building a startup, putting that algorithm at the core of their business. They called it SuperAnnotate.

Just a few months later, Tigran and Vahan joined the Berkeley SkyDeck accelerator and moved SuperAnnotate’s headquarters to Silicon Valley.

“That gave us the next huge boost for us to learn how to do business and how to build a startup,” Tigran recalls. “Because we were just academics, we didn’t know how to actually build a company.”

Since then, SuperAnnotate has grown to become an industry leader in the annotation space, helping over 200 companies label and organize data for machine learning applications. The company employs more than 100 people, mainly in Armenia, and has raised over $17 million in funding in just the past two years.

Tigran says funding from Granatus, one of the company’s first investors, enabled him and his brother to attend conferences, build their networks, and grow their startup’s profile.

“It was very important to show, ‘Hey, we’re here, and you have to take us seriously,’” he says. “Without that money, we wouldn’t have participated (in conferences). And it would’ve been more difficult to push our growth forward without that early name recognition.”

The demand for machine learning applications is only going to grow in the coming years, as the technology becomes increasingly critical to our daily lives. The global machine learning market is projected to top $96 billion by 2025, according to market research firm Grand View Research.

And SuperAnnotate is already positioning itself at the forefront of that boom.