Interview with Ani Sargsyan, Strategy & Partnerships Lead at DevelopWay CJSC

Welcome to this exclusive interview with Ani Sargsyan, Strategy & Partnerships Lead at DevelopWay.

With a passion for innovation and collaboration, Ani has been driving DevelopWay’s growth through strategic partnerships and EU-funded research projects. She’s deeply involved in connecting technology with education — most recently through the CogMath Project, which focuses on advancing adaptive learning solutions.

It’s great to have you with us, Ani!

To start, could you tell us a bit about yourself — your background, education, and how your journey with DevelopWay began?

Even in school, I had two parallel obsessions—mathematics and entrepreneurship—and I kept noticing “fixable” gaps in how we learn. That curiosity took me to Economics at Yerevan State University (BSc/MSc, 2004–2010) to understand how value is created—and someday help build it. I then spent seven years at HSBC Armenia, aiming (boldly for a newcomer) to learn enough to design investment products. Banking taught me discipline with data, risk, and stakeholder communication—and it sharpened the entrepreneur in me: the part that sees a messy problem and wants to fix it.

In 2014 I stepped into tech through mLab ECA, where I met Armen Melkonyan (CTO of mLab ECA, now CEO of DevelopWay). I supported fundraising and growth for early-stage teams and realized my lifelong pull toward education could be a mission, not a hobby: great teachers had limited tools; learners needed more adaptive support. When mLab ECA wrapped up—as it was a time-limited World Bank project—some team members and I joined DevelopWay in 2017 as a PM.

You’ve been with DevelopWay for more than eight years. How has your role, and the company itself, evolved during that time?

I grew as a Project Manager, and we quickly saw that to sustain delivery, we had to bring in new projects. The biggest drivers were events, networking, and especially referrals from long-term clients. That’s when we also invested in SEO to compound trust with discoverability. Today, I keep that loop tight as Strategy & Partnerships Lead. This role lets me connect research, product, and market. That’s also where my early passions converge: using rigorous business thinking to build technology that actually improves how people learn.

DevelopWay, founded in 2009, has grown steadily through resilience and long-term trust. The 2020–2021 period was especially challenging, but our commitment to continuity, transparency, and consistent delivery helped us maintain stability and strengthen client partnerships. This dedication earned both industry recognition and lasting relationships, some of which have evolved into co-development collaborations—joint discovery, shared-risk MVPs, and product innovation driven by mutual trust.

Today, DevelopWay stands as a mature custom software partner, expanding its focus beyond delivery into research and innovation. Beginning in 2025, we launched a dedicated R&D direction, building research-backed solutions with leading universities and EU partners - particularly in education and healthcare—to combine scientific insight with practical software development.

For those who may not know DevelopWay yet, how would you describe what the company does and what makes it stand out in Armenia’s tech scene?

DevelopWay builds custom software, native mobile and modern web platforms, paired with a growth backbone in SEO. We deliver end-to-end solutions for education, healthcare, and other industries - from workflow platforms and integrations to analytics and ongoing optimisation.

We’re a Yerevan team that couples reliable delivery with research-backed innovation—so clients don’t just get software that works; they get software that moves the needle.

In your role as Strategy & Partnerships Lead, what are your main priorities right now? Could you share some examples of strategic partnerships or collaborations that have been particularly impactful for DevelopWay?

Three priorities:

· Research-backed productization — focusing on CogMath, our cognition-aware adaptive learning platform.

· Compounding go-to-market — robust SEO, conversion-focused content, and analytics that ladder up to revenue.

· Alliances for scale — working with top EU universities and domain experts to accelerate validation and adoption.

Our CogMath consortium with the University of Helsinki (FI) and the University of Padova (IT). These partnerships bring cognitive neuroscience, educational psychology, and learning-tech expertise into our product loop—so we can validate impact, not just deploy features

Your project, DoctorMath, gained national recognition, and now CogMath continues that mission. Could you tell us a bit more about these projects and what inspired your focus on education and adaptive learning?

DoctorMath started as a simple promise to make numeracy help personal and accessible. What we learned early was that the real bottleneck isn’t only curriculum—it’s how children think and process. That insight reshaped our “why.”

CogMath continues that mission with a tighter focus: support the child’s mind, not just the next exercise. Our aim is compassionate, evidence-aware personalisation—so a learner who struggles today meets the right help in the moment, and a teacher gets clarity without extra workload. We’re building it with trusted research partners because impact in education must be useful, humane, and verifiable. That’s the motivation: turn small daily wins into long-term confidence in math.

What challenges do you face when developing educational technologies, and how do you overcome them?

Privacy & child safety (GDPR) and scientific validity top the list.

We collect the minimum data, pseudonymize it, get parent consent, run DPIAs, and use kid-appropriate UX; then we validate in-game measures against gold-standard tests, run pre-registered pilots, and re-estimate models so results hold up beyond demos.

In your view, how can Armenia strengthen the bridge between research, education, and IT companies, and what are some of Armenia’s biggest competitive advantages as a software outsourcing destination today?

Armenia today feels like a small Silicon Valley of the Caucasus — compact, fast, and deeply connected. Global leaders like Adobe, ServiceTitan, and NVIDIA all run real engineering teams here, not just satellite offices. The upcoming $500M AI Factory with NVIDIA will make Armenia a regional hub for compute and applied AI.

At the same time, homegrown startups like Picsart, Krisp, and SoloLearn prove that local innovation scales globally. The country’s strength comes from its world-class math and physics education, a deep engineering culture, and the “network of gold engineers” — tight, experienced teams that move ideas from prototype to product fast.

We know you’ve been involved in initiatives like Engineering Week and collaborations with EIF and EU programs. How do these kinds of partnerships shape your long-term vision at DevelopWay?

Engineering City (EIF) is where Armenia’s R&D, startups, and industry literally share a campus. It shortens the distance from idea → prototype → pilot. At the 9th annual Engineering Week, hosted at Engineering City, we met with ecosystem leaders, from AI product teams to deep-tech manufacturers and education initiatives.

Events like this are not just PR; they’re how we source research partners, align on pilot contexts and commit to next steps.

EU programs give us the scaffolding to build responsibly: pre-registered studies, ethics/GDPR by design, and cross-country validation.

Looking ahead, what are the key innovation areas or technologies DevelopWay plans to focus on in the next few years?

We’re focusing on cognition-aware EdTech, and custom software for education, healthcare, and airline automation—merging research-backed innovation with ethical, reliable engineering.

On a side note — just a quick round before we wrap up (short answers):

• Favourite food: Armenian dolma. It’s a simple, comforting mix of taste and tradition - a dish that always reminds me of home and family.

• A book, movie, or resource that shaped your approach to strategy: “Big Magic” by Elizabeth Gilbert, combined with transcendental meditation, helps me lead calmly, think clearly.

• Dream country to visit one day: Singapore - a tiny city that works like a whole region.

Finally, if you could share one lesson from your own journey with the next generation of IT leaders in Armenia, what would it be?

Test early - at the idea stage.

The teams that test earliest compound learning the fastest - because they ship smaller bets, get cleaner signals, and waste less time defending assumptions.

Thank you, Ani, for sharing your story and giving us a glimpse into DevelopWay’s journey. Inspiring as always, can’t wait to see what’s next for you and the team!

DevelopWay is one of the leading companies on TechBehemoths. If you like this interview and think that Ani and his team can help your business, don't hesitate to contact them via TechBehemoths or discover the agency on social media: LI