SmartGateVC

Our Venture Partner Jack Topdjian has joined the organizing team of eMerge Americas, where he advises the healthcare track and advocates for a healthcare industry-led venture consortium designed to align innovation efforts, reduce duplication, and increase the ROI on healthcare investments. Join us in Miami Beach if you are around. #eMergeAmericas

Navigating startup fundraising and valuations at pre-seed and seed stages feel very complicated. Drawing from our experience of investing since 2018, we have put together two practical guides: ‣ Demystifying Startup Valuation: A Simple Formula for Pre-Seed and Seed Rounds: https://lnkd.in/dA8wMdpm ‣ Your Fundraising is a Numbers Game: https://lnkd.in/d88wffdW Authored by Ashot Arzumanyan, Partner at SmartGateVC, these articles offer some actionable insights into how valuations work and approaches to effective fundraising. We'd love your feedback: What fundraising challenges or valuation questions are top-of-mind for you?

Our portfolio company Deep Origin is tackling a big bottleneck in drug discovery: the shortage of high-quality quantum data. Traditional DFT calculations are expensive and don’t scale. Their volunteer-computing platform, Smart Distributed Data Factory (SDDF), changes that by tapping idle CPUs worldwide to run DFT calculations on demand. ‣ ML determines which molecules to focus on. ‣ Already 2M+ DFT calculations for Enamine Ltd. REAL DB. ‣ Data is free and open to the research community. ‣ Published in Nature: https://lnkd.in/gEfih6R5. Check out the dataset and volunteer your computing power: https://sddfactory.cloud/ Salute to the Deep Origin team: Garegin Papoian Garik Petrosyan Tsolak Ghukasyan Vahagn Altunyan Aram Bughdaryan Khachik Smbatyan!

We are thrilled to welcome Alex Pepe, a seasoned operator and former Ixia COO, to SmartGateVC’s venture partner network. Alex has led billion-dollar divisions and advised Fortune 500s - now he brings that operational depth to help scale our next generation of deep-tech startups. SmartGateVC was built on bold vision and hands-on execution; adding Alex strengthens our commitment to delivering outlier returns while accelerating innovation that matters. Alex Pepe joins a strong team of partners, including Ashot Arzumanyan, Areg Alimian, and Jack Topdjian. Explore the full announcement here: https://lnkd.in/dAzuWMeV Stay tuned for more updates!

Activeloop and Krisp, two of our portfolio companies, are now Emerging Specialists in Gartner’s Emerging Market Quadrants for: 🔹 AI Knowledge Management Apps/General Productivity, and 🔹 Generative AI Engineering. Gartner placed Activeloop closest to an Emerging Challenger among peers. They just launched Deep Research, an AI Knowledge Agent delivering multi-modal insights across private and public datasets - automating complex search tasks and boosting productivity. Krisp is an AI-powered assistant for meetings and calls, streamlining communication with noise cancellation, transcriptions, meeting notes, and recording. Recent highlights include the launch of AI Live Interpreter: real-time speech-to-speech translation in 25+ languages.

As we welcome ThirdLaw Molecular to the SmartGateVC family, we are excited about the future we are building together. ThirdLaw is founded by Prof. Christian Schafmeister, the inventor of stapled peptides, which led to the creation of Rein Therapeutics and Parabilis Medicines. The company is pioneering Spiroligomer™ molecules - a new class of synthetic therapeutics designed to overcome the limitations of small molecules and biologics.  With $16.5M in non-dilutive funding from the United States Department of Defense and a 4.5B+ programmable compound library, ThirdLaw Molecular is unlocking a fundamentally new approach to drug discovery. Spiroligomers™ are precision-engineered to bind virtually any protein target - including those previously dismissed as “undruggable” - with unmatched selectivity, bioavailability, and cell permeability. Unlike traditional discovery approaches that rely on trial and error, Spiroligomers™ can be computationally designed for specific targets, paving the way for rational drug design at an unprecedented scale and speed.  We co-led ThirdLaw’s $1.5M pre-seed round and are excited to partner with Prof. Christian Schafmeister and the team as they push the boundaries of molecular therapeutics. Check out more here: https://lnkd.in/g8Gu74iy PS: in the photo, Dr. Schafmeister with 2016 Nobel Prize laureate, Sir Fraser Stoddart, who popularized the term 'molecular LEGO' and endorsed its use to describe programmable, shape-defined Spiroligomers.

2024 was a landmark year for SmartGateVC, as we expanded our portfolio to 33 investments, with several yet to be announced. SuperAnnotate’s $36M Series B with NVIDIA and Databricks highlighted the impact of our early bets, while the Deep Origin and Biosim AI merger and the launch of #Balto, the first AI drug modeling assistant, paved the way for innovation in life sciences. Newly announced investments, including Ritual Dental, TACTUN, and Vonova, were added to our portfolio. Our focus remains on transformative opportunities in AI x Physical World, AI x Cybersecurity, and AI x Life Sciences. We also welcomed Areg Alimian as Partner, enhancing our capacity to support high-growth startups (stay tuned for more news re our team). As we approach the close of our second fund, we thank our investors and partners for their trust and support - 2025 is set to be another year of significant progress and milestones.

Forbes recently featured Armine Galstyan and our investment journey at SmartGateVC! As we near the close of our second fund, we are proud to reflect on the impact of our work: 🚀 32 pre-seed startups in our portfolio; 💼 $1B+ portfolio enterprise value; 📈 10-50x investment markups achieved. The article highlights our investment philosophy and approach: ✓ Spotting transformative technologies before they hit the mainstream; ✓ Backing visionary founders tackling technology's most complex challenges; ✓ Engineering unique deals to uncover overlooked opportunities. Kudos to Melissa Houston, CPA for capturing our journey with precision and insight. Check out the full article: https://lnkd.in/dyV4vQGB #DeepTech #Innovation #InvestmentStrategy

What an incredible milestone for SuperAnnotate, one of the early companies in the SmartGateVC portfolio! Back in 2018, long before AI emerged as the industry-defining trend it is today, we placed our bet on a capable team and an idea set to become best-in-class at feeding AI systems with high-quality data. Fast forward to now, we couldn’t be prouder to see SuperAnnotate close their $36M Series B round with strategic investors like Socium Ventures (Cox Enterprises), NVIDIA, Databricks Ventures as well as Lionel Messi’s Play Time, Glynn Capital, and others. Check out more here: https://lnkd.in/emHpqs-W. Congrats to the entire SuperAnnotate team! We are thrilled to be part of this journey riding the massive AI wave. Vahan Petrosyan Tigran Petrosyan

📢 Our portfolio company Deep Origin introduces #Balto, a cutting-edge AI assistant designed to tackle the complexities of drug discovery. #Balto leverages Deep Origin’s proprietary, high-performance molecular modeling algorithm, one of the most advanced available today, surpassing industry standards like AutoDock Vina and Schrödinger's Glide with 10x better enrichment factors. This level of performance opens up new horizons for researchers, offering batch docking capabilities for up to 1,000 compounds - an unprecedented scale in the search for viable drug candidates. Deep Origin’s #Balto also addresses practical research needs with enhanced document processing, such as a powerful PDF reader for streamlined data handling, enabling scientists to stay focused on discovery without interruption. Congrats Michael Antonov, Garegin Papoian & team! Learn more about how Balto is setting new standards in AI-driven drug discovery here: https://lnkd.in/d7XJhEys. #AI #DrugDiscovery #MolecularModeling