SmartGateVC
VC Fund
Yerevan, Armenia
SmartGateVC is a SoCal and Armenia based VC with a focus on pre-seed investments in AI. Krisp (the world’s best noise cancellation technology), SuperAnnotate (the fastest annotation platform and services for training AI) are among our investments (27 portfolio companies since 2018). Sierra Ventures, Upfront Ventures, AI Fund, YC, and others areamong our follow-on investors. We invest out of 2 funds and our investors include Tim Draper, One Way Ventures, and other high-profile GPs, entrepreneurs, and professionals.
- Total investments:
- 44
- Last investment:
- Lead investor:
- 52%
- Fund size:
- $11M
- Last fund:
Last updated:
For AI agents: llms.txt
Industries SmartGateVC invests in
Stages SmartGateVC invests in
Countries SmartGateVC invests in
Round sizes
Contacts
| Name | Phone | Socials | |
|---|---|---|---|
Round size
- Seed
- $2.5M–$10M
- Pre-Seed
- $250k–$2.7M
Investment Focus
Industry
- Artificial Intelligence 16 (36%)
- Machine Learning 9 (20%)
- Health Care 6 (14%)
- Computer Vision 5 (11%)
- SaaS 4 (9%)
Stage
- Pre-Seed 27 (61%)
- Seed 8 (18%)
- Angel 1 (2%)
Country
- United States 24 (55%)
- Armenia 3 (7%)
- United Kingdom 2 (5%)
Team
| Name | Title | Investments | Links | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Ashot Arzumanyan
Partner
|
Partner | Total investments: 5 | Find email | |
Jack Topdjian
Healthcare, Lifesciences and Medical Devices Venture Partner
|
Healthcare, Lifesciences and Medical Devices Venture Partner | Total investments: 1 | Find email | |
Vazgen Hakobjanyan
Partner (Fund I)
|
Partner (Fund I) | Total investments: 3 | Find email | |
Areg Alimian
Partner
|
Partner | Total investments: 1 | Find email | |
Hambardzum Kaghketsyan
Partner (Fund I)
|
Partner (Fund I) | Total investments: 2 | Find email |
Investments
| Company | Description | Round | Links |
|---|---|---|---|
| Neuraworx Medical Technology is a neurotechnology company developing first-in-class bioelectronic solutions for brain health. | Seed / Dec 18, 2025 | ||
| Cordance Medical is a medical device company that develops radical therapy for a variety of CNS pathology, including primary and metastatic cancer, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's diseases. | $8M / Seed / Nov 24, 2025 | ||
| Opto Biosystems specializes in the development of innovative healthcare technologies that bridge the gap between cancer neuroscience and bioelectronics. The company focuses on creating smaller, softer, and wireless biological interfaces designed to offer a new treatment modality. By leveraging advancements in neural engineering and bioelectronics,Opto Biosystems is dedicated to building new tools that interface with the body, aiming to improve patient outcomes in the healthcare sector. Their work includes exploring the stability of thin-film electrodes for neuromodulation, highlighting their commitment to advancing medical technology. | $10M / Seed / Nov 03, 2025 | ||
| Fleak is a serverless API builder tailored for creating AI data workflows effortlessly. It enables users to quickly develop and deploy API backends with a single click. Leveraging a low-code workflow builder, Fleak simplifies request payload manipulation using SQL, integrates seamlessly with LLM or embedding models, and supports invoking AWS Lambdafunctions. Fleak excels in handling parallelization and concurrency, automatically optimizing performance for high throughput across all nodes. This ensures scalable and reliable API deployment without requiring users to manage multithreading or load balancing. Outputs can be delivered directly via synchronous HTTP responses or forwarded to third-party data storage systems like Snowflake and Pinecone, making Fleak production-ready for enterprise applications. | $6M / Seed / Oct 01, 2025 | ||
| Ladder Bio is a therapeutics company that develops synthetic, ladder-shaped compounds engineered for high specificity and stability. The platform combines rational molecular design with computational discovery to create therapeutics with the potency of biologics but the drug-like stability, oral bioavailability, and cell permeability of smallmolecules. Ladder Bio also sees applications for its Spiroligomer chemistry in diagnostics, where the high-affinity binding and synthetic stability can replace more variable biologics. | $1.5M / Pre-Seed / Feb 13, 2025 | ||
| Perceptron AI uses AI to bridge the gap between digital and physical realms, enabling complex problem-solving in dynamic environments. | Pre-Seed / Nov 05, 2024 | ||
| Personalized preventative oral care that helps you and your whole family form dental habits that stick. | Pre-Seed / Oct 29, 2024 | ||
| Vonova is developing a breakthrough catheter platform as the first alternative to drilling through the skull for the $2B+ brain interface market—a broad category of interventions addressing chronic neurological disorders with cortical electrodes for both recording and stimulating. The company's flagship product, the Cerebro Atlas System, willprovide neuromodulation therapy for drug-resistant chronic pain without the high risk and discomfort associated with invasive brain surgery. Founded in 2022 by a management team with expertise in catheter device development and neurology, Vonova has issued US patents, demonstrated the procedure's feasibility with clinical key opinion leaders, and received an NIH Blueprint Seed Award. Vonova has also been selected from over 1300 medtech companies to participate in the MedTech Innovator cohort 2024 and accelerate the commercial strategy with a wide network of strategic partners. | Pre-Seed / Aug 20, 2024 | ||
| We build industrial controllers that work like a brain for machines such as wind turbines, testing machines, and other industrial machinery. With our platform manufacturers can set up hardware controllers and build industrial machinery software 10 times faster and without coding. | Pre-Seed / May 08, 2024 | ||
| In-silico toxicity assessment of drug candidates. | Pre-Seed / Nov 06, 2023 | ||
| See all 44 investments → | |||
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FAQ
What does SmartGateVC invest in?
SmartGateVC invests primarily in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Health Care startups, most often at Pre-Seed and Seed stage. Most of the 44 investments tracked by Shizune back companies in United States. The Investment Focus section breaks down every industry, stage and country in the portfolio.
What round sizes does SmartGateVC invest in?
SmartGateVC typically joins rounds of $2.5M–$10M at Seed and $250k–$2.7M at Pre-Seed. These are whole funding-round sizes, not SmartGateVC's own check, which is rarely disclosed: the 10th–90th percentile of the confirmed public funding rounds SmartGateVC took part in.
How do I contact SmartGateVC?
Public channels for SmartGateVC include LinkedIn, X (Twitter) and the website linked on this profile. For a verified work email and phone number, create a free Shizune account — contact data is searched across 20+ sources and validated before delivery, so your outreach lands in the right inbox.
Who are the partners at SmartGateVC?
The team at SmartGateVC includes Ashot Arzumanyan (Partner), Jack Topdjian (Healthcare, Lifesciences and Medical Devices Venture Partner) and Vazgen Hakobjanyan (Partner (Fund I)). The Team section lists each member with their title, investment count and links.
Is Shizune's investor data accurate?
Yes — every stat on this profile is calculated from confirmed public funding rounds monitored across hundreds of sources since 2020. This profile was last refreshed in Oct 2026 and is updated monthly. Spotted something off? Use the “Suggest an edit” link near the top of the page.
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