From PhD Student to Machine Learning Entrepreneur: SuperAnnotate CEO Tigran Petrosyan (Part 1)

Tigran and his brother were Ph.D. students when they decided to quit their Ph.D. program and build a company out of their Ph.D. research technology.

They have since raised over $15M in funding and built a customer base of ~200 in their ML Ops business. They are leveraging countries like Armenia and Bangladesh for development and data services.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

Tigran Petrosyan: I was born in Armenia. It’s a small country in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union Republic. I was raised in one of the suburbs. This was the place where learning and studying were not so popular. Interestingly enough, my parents were very keen on us always being on top of our studies, especially math.

Being raised in that environment was quite challenging. We managed to be on top of our grades in school and eventually got to universities in Europe and US. My brother went to the US. I studied in Switzerland.

Sramana Mitra: Both you and your brother have technical degrees from foreign universities?

Tigran Petrosyan: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Did you go back to Armenia after finishing school?

Tigran Petrosyan: Yes. I did my Bachelors in Armenia. I moved to Switzerland for my Master’s and Ph.D. I left Ph.D. to start a company with my brother.

Sramana Mitra: Is that the company we’re going to talk about?

Tigran Petrosyan: Yes, this is the only company I have.

Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking about when you quit your Ph.D. program and started the company?

Tigran Petrosyan: It was 2018.

Sramana Mitra: What was the concept and how did you come up with the concept?

Tigran Petrosyan: It came very spontaneously. In my PhD, I was working on biomedical imaging. I could see this early development of AI and how it helps transform diagnostics, basically AI making better diagnoses. It was early steps, but I was fascinated by it. I was invited to give a TEDx talk in
Switzerland about this.

My brother was working on image segmentation technologies. His algorithms attracted a lot of attention in image annotation data space. My brother and I saw that there was an opportunity for a startup competition in Armenia. We were really tired of our PhDs and wanted some rest in our home country. It was a lake-side event.

We thought we could fake an application and go there. Somehow, that worked. Eventually, we got pretty serious when we got in. We got into some special program. We pitched the solution, which was this technology about annotation. That pitch got first place in the competition. We ultimately realized to do that for real.

Sramana Mitra: Did you start the company in Armenia?

Tigran Petrosyan: We started in Armenia. Quite quickly, we incorporated our company in the US and came to the accelerator program in Berkeley called SkyDeck. That gave us that early understanding of how to build a business.

Sramana Mitra: This competition gave you funding?

Tigran Petrosyan: Yes, that triggered interest from a lot of investors.

Sramana Mitra: Armenia has investors that are looking for startup investments?

Tigran Petrosyan: Yes, it’s a great investment environment, especially for early-stage companies.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you raise?

Tigran Petrosyan: About $100,000 at that time. It felt really huge at that time.

Sramana Mitra: You haven’t really built anything yet at this point.

Tigran Petrosyan: No. I didn’t even know how to build a startup. We were researchers.

Sramana Mitra: You were given $100,000 basically for your own education in building a startup.

Tigran Petrosyan: Funny enough, we were hiring researchers.

This segment is part 1 in the series : From PhD Student to Machine Learning Entrepreneur: SuperAnnotate CEO Tigran Petrosyan
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