Public Lecture: Fuel for Your Fire: How to Fund Your Idea to Success, October 15 at 4:30 PM

The lecture will focus on building a startup and related challenges.

Yervand Sarkisyan

Yervand is a tech entrepreneur and investment professional based in London. He is the CFO and advisor at Sedition, a London-based digital arts platform representing world leading contemporary artists, and also the co-founder of Agnian, a web development and design firm in the UK and Armenia. He is also an advisor at state.com, a company set up to democratize opinion sharing, led by Jawbone’s founder. Yervand has been engaged in the development of the Armenian tech sector for more than a decade. Together with his partners, Yervand is launching Granatus Ventures, the first Armenian venture capital fund providing seed and early stage financing to innovative startups. He majored in Mathematics at Yerevan State University and holds a Master of Finance with Distinction from the London Business School. He also holds a Master of Science in Computer and Information Science from the American University of Armenia. He was awarded the Coller Institute of Private Equity Prize in 2011.

Pierre Hennes

Pierre has significant international experience in technology and new venture creation and has worked and invested across the US, Europe, Russia and Asia. Pierre is currently the Managing Partner of Extream Ventures, a Singapore-based early-stage venture capital firm launched in 2009, funded in part by the Singapore Government’s National Research Foundation. He is also a Partner of Upstream Ventures, a Singapore-based seed and startup investment firm launched in 2003. Pierre has backed successful Singapore-based technology companies such as Singular ID (anti-counterfeit solutions, sold to Bilcare India), Property Guru (Southeast Asia’s largest online property portal, major investment from IS24/Deutsche Telekom), Just Commodity (commodities trading risk management software) and Tagit. Pierre’s latest passion for entrepreneurship brings him to Armenia, where together with his partners he is launching Granatus Ventures, Armenia’s first professional venture capital firm aimed at catalyzing Armenia’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. Pierre earned a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in International Relations from Boston University and a Master of Business Administration from New York University’s Stern School of Business.