From PhD Student to Machine Learning Entrepreneur: SuperAnnotate CEO Tigran Petrosyan (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: After raising that $100,000, you went to the accelerator. Did the accelerator give you some money?

Tigran Petrosyan: Yes. It was $100,000.

Sramana Mitra: Is there any other investment?

Tigran Petrosyan: We had a few other angels and pre-seed. The big part came when we raised our seed round in early 2020 with Point9 Capital. It’s one of the most highly-respected European VC firms. That $3 million helped us expand our operations and build a go-to market in the US and Europe.

Sramana Mitra: In that 2020 round, you already had some customers?

Tigran Petrosyan: Yes. We had the first customer I talked about. Then we had a few other customers in different areas.

Sramana Mitra: Did you zero in on the fact that you were going to be an MLOps company?

Tigran Petrosyan: We have been iterating in our story for quite sometime after the accelerator. We wanted to understand what we wanted to become. The fact that we managed to raise a seed round with a really great investor was the fact that we understood what we wanted to become. We wanted to become a data infrastructure software to build MLOps applications on the data side. We came in with a platform-first approach rather than a service. Platform became different. It helped to bring more customers.

Sramana Mitra: Then COVID hits. But you were running a virtual company, it sounds like.

Tigran Petrosyan: That’s right. As soon as I moved to the US, I went back to Armenia and came back again. Then COVID hit. In the US, we were fully operating remotely. For our team in Armenia, we were trying to handle how to work remotely, but we were mostly in the office. The country didn’t close that much as in California. Eventually, we became a hybrid remote. We also have a great team in Bangladesh, which was also in the office.

Sramana Mitra: After that $3 million round, did you get additional financing?

Tigran Petrosyan: After 1.5 years, we wanted to go to the next stage. In 2021, we met a great investor from Base10 Partners. We did a $14.5 million Series A round. That helped us to grow our operations from $1 million in revenue to multiple million.

Sramana Mitra: Other than inbound, what else are you doing in terms of market and sales development?

Tigran Petrosyan: As we moved towards more and more enterprise clients, we wanted to make sure of our presence at these big conferences. Nowadays, there’s an interesting shift where face-to-face becomes hot again. Getting in front of the customers and learning about them, face-to-face also becomes an important factor.

Sramana Mitra: What are the average deal sizes?

Tigran Petrosyan: If you think about SMB, it can range from $10,000 to $30,000. On the enterprise side, it can be $100,000 to $500,000 per year.

Sramana Mitra: What is the split between enterprise and SMB?

Tigran Petrosyan: About 20 enterprise clients generate about 50% of the revenue.

Sramana Mitra: Your own team, how big is that now?

Tigran Petrosyan: We now have about 110 people.

Sramana Mitra: Where are they based?

Tigran Petrosyan: US, Europe, Armenia, and Bangladesh.

Sramana Mitra: The Bangladesh team does more of the annotation?

Tigran Petrosyan: Yes. They are leading the service operation and supply chain side. as well as the quality assurance. It’s the marketplace operations team.

This segment is part 4 in the series : From PhD Student to Machine Learning Entrepreneur: SuperAnnotate CEO Tigran Petrosyan
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