She’s Next Talks with Gayane Arakelyan

At just 20 years old, journalism student Gayane Arakelyan was handed a daunting task: translate an English article about “cloud computing” into Armenian. She knew nothing about technology, but she accepted the challenge anyway. That single translation connected her with international diasporan entrepreneurs and laid the groundwork for Digital Pomegranate, which has grown into the largest tech company outside of Armenia’s capital, Yerevan.

Rather than following the traditional route to the capital, Arakelyan and her co-founders deliberately established their headquarters in her native Gyumri, Armenia’s second city. To overcome the challenge of finding local talent, they launched a campaign to draw workers away from the capital’s traffic and air pollution, offering a better lifestyle and remote work benefits. “If it was an easy path, everyone would already be there,” she reflects.

Since taking over as CEO in 2018, Arakelyan has steered the company from a contract software shop into a product development firm. Their latest venture, idea boxes.app, is currently launching in Japan, where they are actively looking to partner with 50 female founders. Through a revenue-share model, Digital Pomegranate provides the “tech muscle” to build complex business apps, allowing women to focus entirely on their industry expertise and market development.

Navigating the tech world as a non-engineer, Arakelyan relies heavily on her leadership skills to create an empowering environment for her team. She notes that while Armenia’s IT sector enjoys a rare 50/50 gender split, self-doubt remains the biggest hurdle for female entrepreneurs. Following a life-changing leadership program in the United States, she realised her own missing link. “I was trying to be as equal as possible, trying to focus more on hard work,” she says, before discovering that simply having confidence in her abilities was enough.

Today, Arakelyan considers her greatest success to be the harmony she has found between her demanding international career and her family life with two young children. Her ultimate advice for women navigating the high-stress tech industry is to surround themselves with a supportive community and refuse to quit. “We just need to keep going,” she urges. “Because when we stop, it makes a lot of things stop”.