Nashville Hosts Armenian American Forum

BAJ Accelerator, cofounded by her and Dr. Armen Kherlopian, has graduated 135 founders of 20 countries from its program, but 55 percent of the graduates are startups with Armenian founders or from Armenia. BAJ is a collaboration among three organizations: Baltic American Chamber of Commerce, Orion Worldwide Innovations and the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech, which in turn was established jointly by Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. BAJ’s name composed of initials corresponding to the Baltic states, Armenia and Jacobs (Israel), places Armenia on the same level as several well-known technologically advanced countries, Arakelyan explained.

Orion meanwhile collaborates with many nonprofit organizations, syndicates, businesses and universities. Arakelyan highlighted its relationship with the Armenian Bar Association in bringing major projects to Armenia and working with several ministers in the government to improve intellectual property protection and corporate law. As a result, in July 2021, changes were made in this realm, including the protection of minority shareholder rights. Now Orion and its partners are trying to work with Armenia’s judges and the courts.

Orion works with the Central Bank of Armenia and BDO Armenia, a member of the audit, tax and consulting network BDO International Limited, to bring corporate venture or investment culture to Armenia. Since 2022, they have instituted a program called Alternative Investment in Armenia, Arakelyan said, to provide seminars and information for businesses on investment and related legislative information in Armenia (with participation fees). In 2025, the program will be called Power Consulting Days. Reconomy, a Swiss and Swedish economic development program, also supports such efforts.

Arakelyan is starting another effort, she said, to build Armenian wealth and advocacy, by creating what she calls the Digital Julfa Network (www.digitaljulfa.com), which was announced in 2022. She based the idea on the old Armenian trading network based in Iran from the 1600s to the 1800s, in which trust allowed Armenian merchants dispersed throughout the world, from Asia to Europe and even the Americas, to globally trade. Now she was working to create a platform for Armenian businesses to connect and operate globally, based on the Meta 3-D domain. Its inaugural virtual event took place in Dubai on April 22.

Finally, Arakelyan encouraged those present to support startup growth as technology would give Armenia and Armenians fast and sustainable growth. She suggested learning about the ecosystem in Armenia, meaning the companies there, as well as other Armenian-American companies like Service Titan, in whose initial public offering (IPO) few Armenians invested and therefore lost an opportunity to make a great deal of money.

Investment in Armenia and Innovation

In his presentation, Kherlopian, CEO and partner in Covenant Venture Capital as well as founding partner in the BAJ Accelerator, similarly encouraged participants to become angel investors. He stressed that the combination of capital, technology and influence could have an outsized impact for a country such as Armenia and its global diaspora. Armenia’s economy (its gross domestic product) is only around 25 billion dollars per year. That of Armenia’s eastern neighbor is three times greater. Yet, Kherlopian pointed out, a startup unicorn is a company valued at $1 billion and can be built by only 50 people, so a strategy finding customers for such companies can lead to increased security, job opportunity as well as prosperity.

Investing can be done by individuals, a syndicate or investment fund like the Investors Club of Armenia (ICA), crowdfunding like Eqwefy, accelerators like BAJ, or venture capital. He estimated that there are not more than 100 Armenians in the world today joining in this strategy, yet at least 300 were needed. Furthermore, Kherlopian asked where the Armenian nonprofit endowments or a sovereign (state-owned) investment fund are in this picture.

Telecom industry expert Berge Ayvazian, a senior analyst and consultant at Wireless 20/20, amplified some of these themes. Ayvazian, the co-founder of ArmTech — an international organization linking Armenian professionals in high tech throughout the world, a board advisor for Eqwefy, and a member of the Angel Investor Club of Armenia, declared: “For almost 30 years now I am trying to bring the tech industry in Armenia to a level of success that could both propel the economy, create employment and create a way for the whole worldwide Armenian community to galvanize together around technology.”

Ayvazian said that as a global Armenian network state, the numbers of Armenians are increased compared to the population of the small country of Armenia and the latter become more powerful thanks to their compatriots abroad. He pointed to how in his own career, he was able to leverage his experience to help Armenia rebuild its high-tech sector after independence, when President Robert Kocharyan called for help at a forum in New York. They founded the Armenian High-Tech Council in 2000 and went to Armenia to work with the government and industry there, Ayvazian said.

They built ArmTech, which now has 5,000 members globally. Ayvazian related that they brought Orange to Armenia to create competition in the telecom industry there, though eventually it was sold to UComm. Now, AI-driven startup companies are being created in Armenia which work within industry-specific sectors. Recently, Nvidia Corporation opened up a research center in Armenia to work on accelerated computing and AI and there are many more developments in Armenia that Ayvazian quickly noted.

Ayvazian said, “If you want to develop the best generative AI you want to come to Armenia.” With the convergence of AI and 5G infrastructure and Starlink in Armenia, Ayvazian spelled out in one of his slides that new applications in what is called the Internet of Things (the connectivity or networking of physical objects) are forthcoming.

How to take the benefits of the high-tech industry in Armenia and democratize it? Ayvazian said that Armenia is just starting to have retirement funds. There are angel investors. However, to make investing in this field more accessible to ordinary Armenians, he said he and his colleagues founded Eqwefy.

Data scientist Dr. Charlie Apigian, who leads Data & AI Strategy at the accounting and business consulting firm LBMC and serves as a professor at Belmont University in Nashville, spoke about his career, identity and community commitment before pointing to AI as an accelerator of change. He exclaimed, “Who is going to thrive in a world of AI? It is going to be creative people, innovator, builders. It is going to be those kinds of individuals. Who are those individuals? Armenians. Those are the people that I think are going to thrive, and I am very excited [about] what we are doing in Armenia, but also what we can do here. This type of group and gathering I think …  is a great way to get that started.”

Mark Chenian, UBS investment banker and economic consultant to the Republic of Armenia, spoke about his goal to create an Armenian opera as well as his Komitas digital brain initiative. The latter is an unusual project whose origins dated back decades to a conversation with musicologist Ohannes Salibian about the puzzle of the ancient Armenian khaz system of musical notation. It fell into disuse and its meaning was lost by the 19^th century. Ethnomusicologist Komitas Vardapet (Soghomon Soghomonian) attempted to solve the meaning of its symbols and Salibian said Komitas claimed some success in some of his letters but no one knows the specifics.

Three years ago Chenian discovered that 23,000 documents penned by Komitas have been assembled in Armenia. He offered to digitize all of them and then bring in specialists in machine learning (a specialized field within AI) and machine translation together with musicologists to see what Komitas was thinking or had discovered. The digitization should be finished by the end of this year, Chenian estimated.

If this project is successful, then the approach will be patented to the benefit of the Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts (Matenadaran) in Yerevan. Chenian said then the whole world will be invited to come and recreate Beethoven’s brain (and presumably that of many other artists and intellectuals).

A hands-on technology-related initiative, Little Bird Armenian Development, Inc., a 501c3 nonprofit based in New York City, was presented by Stephen Haroian, who professionally is involved in software sales. He related that Little Bird was founded by him and his wife Astrid (Astghik) in November 2022. Haroian visited a small village in Syunik Province, near the border with Azerbaijan that had been attacked only some six weeks prior. He went to the frontline villages and found out that that there was an acute need for thermal cameras to see at night and through the heavy fog, as well as Starlink internet for reliable backup communication if the conventional cell and radio towers are disabled.

The couple, with a lot of help from their friends, since then delivered over $160,000 worth of this type of nonlethal supplies to the frontlines. Haroian said that though the Armenian government is slow and not efficient, it is starting to catch up in this type of equipment, so Little Bird’s goal is only to be a band aid to fill these gaps until it becomes unnecessary.

The moral of his story, he said, was that everyone, no matter their background, has a value to add for Armenia. He himself was able to use his business development and management skills to make life safer on its border areas.

Two Approaches to Understanding and Improving Community Engagement

Khajag Geukjian, a New York-based managing consultant and head of Enterprise Market Risk Management at the financial services and software company Murex, spoke of his active Armenian involvement growing up in Beirut, and later traveling across the world to work on different projects. Armenian identity inspires trust, he learned.

He suggested looking at the Armenian nation state or network state with its communities as a multinational company headquartered in Armenia with branches throughout the world. Vertical integration, meaning Armenian companies doing business with one another, will help its growth. Horizontal diversification on the other hand, meaning investing in many different fields like financial services, military production, and even the environment, will lower risk and be more sustainable and self-sufficient for the long term. Geographical diversification, again like multinational companies, will allow for a strong diaspora and a strong Armenia reinforcing one another. Communities must grow and not just aim at preserving what they already are.

Finally, he said, just as a company may get more creative ideas with a horizontal structure than just a pure top-down approach, Armenians must be included as active contributors of the community, so that Armenia, as headquarters, can engage the diaspora in more strategic decision making, while individuals also must actively contribute to Armenian society.

Like many of the other conference participants, Geukjian declared that today’s Armenians have the responsibility to hand over a better Armenian community to the generations to come.

Intellectual property and business attorney Karén Tonoyan of Ridgewood, NJ, founder of the Tono Law Group, member of the Board of Armenian Engineers and Scientists Association and co-chair of the Intellectual Property /Information Technology Committee of the Armenian Bar Association, took a more contrarian approach in his talk by talking about failures in his Armenian initiatives as learning opportunities. He said, “I am going to be talking about the failures specifically in order to change the paradigm about how we engage… If we don’t talk about what’s broken we can’t really talk about how to fix it.”

Tonoyan declared that 80 to 90 percent of diasporan Armenians are not involved actively in any ongoing Armenian activity or organization. Yet, Armenians love having organizations or groups for everything. Tonoyan said, “The only problem [is] that half of these groups don’t talk to each other, and the other half don’t know what the first half is doing.”

He enumerated many challenges to working together, including political divisions, Armenia vs. diaspora, old vs. new diaspora, different geographical/cultural origins, different ideas about how to properly act, and language barriers. Causes could be epigenetic trauma response, centuries living without a state, Soviet oppression and merely struggling to survive from generation to generation, Tonoyan speculated, as opposed to strategic overarching goals for individuals, their families and their nation.

He then provided some examples from his personal experience. Born in the Ukraine, he moved to Brooklyn and then New Jersey, where he went to Armenian school, joined the Armenian Church Youth Organization of America (ACYOA), Antranig Dance Ensemble for 15 years, and eventually joined the Armenian Youth Federation (AYF). He became a leader of the Rutgers University Armenian Student Association while in college, and hosted an event for Armenian students to learn what internships were available. The Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU), Armenian National Committee of America, and the Armenian Assembly came to make presentations, but he wondered why he needed to do so much research to find out about them.

He then worked for the AGBU for several years (2008-10) as university outreach coordinator, and he had his first failure there while attempting to bring Armenian youth and organizations together. Later, a second attempt during the Syrian war in 2014 to bring youth organizations like ACYOA, AYF and Homenetmen together through the Pan Armenian Youth Alliance was a little better but also not very successful due to the community divisions he previously listed.

The 2020 Artsakh war led to Tonoyan’s third failure of bringing Armenian organizations together, through a new platform or space for collaboration called United Armenian Inter-Org (United AIO). This was an attempt to avoid duplication or incongruency of efforts through a conference held in 2021 with 2,000 people attending presentations about projects that could take place in Armenia. Tonoyan admitted that this effort could not continue its role because it was not set up as an anchor project.

He pointed out that with no centralized platform, shared database for communication, nor a systematic approach to collaboration, duplication of efforts leads to the issue of inefficient use of resources and even at times the unintentional countering of efforts. He gave the example of the latter: when during the 2020 war supplies to Armenia were going on trucks to the Los Angeles International Airport to be flown out and an Armenian protest was organized to block the highway they were on. Fortunately, the protest was stopped just in the nick of time.

His suggested remedy was to build structured collaboration platforms instead of creating another organization to carry out one project or achieve one goal. Individuals can advise people in fields they are knowledgeable about. Instead of working for Armenia being a sacrifice, mutually beneficial relationships can be created. Connections can be made with startups that generate income. Armenians can learn from what other diasporan communities and cultures do.

“Most importantly,” he said, “proactively constantly evolve and try to future proof yourself by evaluating and challenging the approaches that you use. Don’t be afraid to admit that you are doing things wrong. It is not a bad thing. People make mistakes. It is not a means to demean you, or your capability as a leader or an organizer. It actually means you care about getting better.”

Tonoyan proposed shifting the paradigm from volunteering and sacrificing for the cause to a more positive approach, as people don’t necessarily have to lose out by helping Armenia or fellow Armenians. Instead they can benefit. Like many of the speakers already mentioned, Tonoyan encouraged people to start working with startup companies and invest in Armenia as one way to do this.

He suggested that Armenians must move from crisis response to proactive leadership, and seek collaboration and innovation to anticipate forthcoming changes. He said, “The cycle of technological development is accelerating. If you are not actively participating in the future it will pass you by and you will become obsolete. And we can’t just be reacting to these things and we can’t just be keeping up with the times. We have to be at the forefront. We have to anticipate the changes that are going to be happening and come to meet those challenges before they hit you.”

The Broad Range of Participants

Many of the talks presented the workings of Armenian organizations and institutions, including the Armenian Assembly of America (by Mariam Khaloyan), the Armenian National Committee of America (Gev Iskajyan), the Armenian Tree Project (Jeanmarie Papelian), the Tekeyan Cultural Association of the US and Canada and the Armenian Mirror-Spectator (Aram Arkun), the Armenian Weekly (Lilly Torosyan), Armenian International Women’s Association or AIWA (Silva Katchiguian), the Daughters of Vartan (Gloria Korkoian), National Association for Armenian Studies and Research or NAASR (Sara Cohan), the Armenian Professional Society in Los Angeles (Ani Petrosyan), the H. Hovnanian Family Foundation in connection with Repat Armenia, Birthright Armenia, Armenian Volunteer Corps, HIKEArmenia, and The Armenia Project (Linda Yepoyan), International Armenian Literary Alliance or IALA (Garine Boyadjian Issasi), Heritage of Armenian Culture (HARC) radio program in Detroit and Remarkable Armenians blog (Charlene Apigian), and the Armenian female innovation platform FemInno of Yerevan/Los Angeles (Seda Papoyan).

Additional speakers included Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Relations graduate student Alena Mikhaelyan and Dr. Nora Lessersohn, Nikit and Eleanora Ordjanian Visiting Professor of Armenian Studies at Columbia University, who spoke about Ottoman Armenian journalist Christopher Oscanyan (1818-1895), an early immigrant to the US. Sommelier Irina Sargisova of New York City introduced a winetasting sponsored by Storica Wines. Julie Kupelian Keltonic, owner of Sweet Armenia Bakery in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, spoke about the mission of her bakery to support the Young Life Armenia Christian ministry.

Videos of the talks are available at https://tennessee.hyelandproject.com/armenian-american-forum-2025/