Don’t wait for permission

Two start-ups built from Yerevan, both global from the start. Ani Hovhannisyan on fair pay for writers and why women founders shouldn’t wait.

Ani Hovhannisyan was thrilled until she read the small print. A few years ago, working on a detective novel in Yerevan, she received an exclusive offer from an online publishing platform. The contract would have handed it around 70 per cent of her revenue and tied up much of her creative freedom. She turned it down. “I realised that many of the problems I personally experienced as a writer were shared by thousands of other people,” she says. “Instead of simply talking about those problems, I wanted to build solutions.” That refusal became LitArchive.

Ani has spent her life somewhere between code and storytelling. At 13 she joined TUMO, Yerevan’s free centre for creative technologies, to study programming and game development. At 16 she enrolled in journalism at Lomonosov Moscow State University, then later took a Master’s in media business. Along the way she won the Armenian round of the NASA Space Apps Challenge and was named best editor-in-chief under 30 in the Eurasian region. She credits the institutions that shaped her. “TUMO played a huge role in shaping my interest in technology,” she says, “while the start-up ecosystem helped me think bigger.”

Journalism left her preoccupied with one problem: how people distinguish truth from lies online. That became Empty Space, a project that grew from educational content on misinformation into an app covering media and digital literacy, from phishing to password security. “When I first started researching media literacy, the conversation was mostly about fake news,” she says. “Today the challenge is much bigger. We have AI-generated images, deepfake videos, and voice cloning.” The aim was to hand people the tools to think for themselves.

LitArchive is a gamified platform where authors publish and earn chapter by chapter rather than waiting years to finish a book. Writers keep ownership, get paid as they go and build an audience in public. In effect she is dragging serialised storytelling into the digital age. She founded it with a friend, now its chief technology officer, after sketching out what a fair deal for authors might look like. She wants the platform’s best stories to grow into comics, games, animation and film.

Trainee X came from a different love. Ani spent 13 years as a rhythmic gymnast before falling for K-pop, where performers sing, dance and model at once. She built the brand with a friend from Ukraine, filming several videos a day in the early months with no guarantee any of it would land. It landed. Trainee X now counts more than 200,000 followers and over 200 million views across various social platforms, and has worked with Warner Records, Universal Music Group, the fashion label Desigual and the Swedish singer Zara Larsson. “Both LitArchive and Trainee X were born from the same idea,” she says. “I wanted to create opportunities in industries that I personally loved.”

What she values most about Trainee X is not the view count. She broke into an industry where their region rarely features, and now hear from girls they have encouraged to start out.

No borders

For both companies, international reach is not a “someday” ambition. “For both start-ups, international growth isn’t really a future goal, it’s already happening,” says Ani. Most of Trainee X’s audience sits outside Armenia, in South Korea, Japan, the United States and Germany; LitArchive is aimed squarely at the English-speaking market. Her start-up recently graduated from the incubation programme run by Plug and Play, the Silicon Valley accelerator that opened a permanent Yerevan office in late 2025 under a three-year deal with the government. Armenia climbed three places to 54th in StartupBlink’s 2025 ranking, and in 2024 ServiceTitan became the first Armenian-founded company to list on Nasdaq.

The harder ground is money. “Some of the challenges that start-ups face in Armenia are similar to those faced everywhere: access to funding, scaling internationally,” she says. “For women founders, there can be additional challenges, and this isn’t just an Armenian issue, it’s a global one.” She is matter-of-fact about the setbacks. “Entrepreneurship teaches you resilience,” she says. “Not every competition is won, not every pitch is successful, and not every opportunity works out the way you hope.”

For all that, she thinks the picture is brightening. “I actually think the situation is getting better every year,” she says, pointing to the accelerators and grants now open to founders. Women make up 40 per cent of Armenia’s tech workforce, above the share in the United States, though they cluster in non-technical roles. She’s Next, the global Visa initiative for women entrepreneurs, ran its first national pitch contest in Armenia in March 2026. “Programmes like She’s Next by Visa are a great example,” she says. “They give founders visibility, mentorship and access to valuable networks, not just financial support.”

Her advice to women starting out is blunt. “Don’t wait for permission,” Ani says. People told her that her ideas were too ambitious and the market too niche; had she listened, neither company would exist. She tells founders to be active in the ecosystem, apply to the accelerator and send the email. “Most opportunities come from consistently showing up,” she says, and from thinking globally on day one: “Armenia is a wonderful place to build a company, but your market doesn’t have to stop at Armenia’s borders.”

“Don’t be afraid to dream big,” she adds; many of her own goals seemed unrealistic when she set them. The line she returns to most is the one she would put to any girl in Yerevan weighing whether to start: “Your location, your age or your gender should never define the size of your ambition.”