Vahe Andonians, CTO Cognaize
Vahe Andonians, CTO
Cognaize: Putting Armenia on the fintech map
“I’ve done a couple of startups before, but I think Cognaize is special.”
That’s how founder Vahe Andonians describes the financial technology company, which uses artificial intelligence to process financial information for some of the world’s largest banks, rating agencies, and insurance companies. The company has employees around the world, with its largest operation in Armenia.
The startup was born out of a recognition that the rapid technological advances of the last decade were opening up new opportunities for financial institutions to extract crucial business insights from vast pools of unstructured documents and data.
“In my mind, Cognaize is a natural evolution of what I have done before,” Vahe says, referring to previous startups. “I think that the current technology stack allows you to do meaningful things with AI, which wasn’t the case even if you go back 15 years.”
To that end, Cognaize put together one of the largest financial document training datasets ever assembled and developed an advanced AI platform to help automate manual workflows for financial institutions and parse key insights out of reams of documents.
Cognaize’s focus on the finance industry may seem niche at first glance, but is not accidental.
“That focus gives us better AI models because they have seen only relevant data and documents that are from the financial industry,” Vahe explains. “As a result, they predict better on these kinds of documents.”
“Also we chose an industry that, of course, has classical difficulties [with AI]…because of private information and because of the knowledge needed to extract financial information,” he continues. “So I think that focus plays into our strength.”
Finance leaders are undoubtedly paying attention: Cognaize is now processing over 30,000 documents every month for major industry players.
In its seed round in 2021, Cognaize raised about $2 million in investment from a number of angel investors and venture capital firms, including Granatus Ventures.
“Granatus was very helpful in every stage,” Vahe says. “They always helped with connections, always helped with investments and with advice. They have been a very good investor for us.”
He adds: “Granatus has done a great service to Armenia itself, not only to us, because this is a small country, and they have been operating for a pretty long time. And they have helped many, many companies as much as they have helped us.”