Softr’s Armenian co-founder talks USD 2.2m investment, team, and tech industry vision

Softr is a platform where you can create a full-functioning website and web applications quickly and without coding skills, using Airtable as the data base.

The founders of the startup, which raised USD 2.2m in the recent seed round ((the round was led by Atlantic Labs jointly with Philipp Moehring (Tiny.VC))  are Berlin-based Mariam Hakobyan and Artur Mkrtchyan. The main members of the team (coders, designers, etc.) are based in Armenia.

Itel.am has talked with one of the founders, Artur Mkrtchyan.

Softr simplifies routine for businesses

“Our main objective is to enable business founders and other people, who aren’t part of IT, to test their ideas in a quick and affordable way, automate their businesses. In general, we are trying to help make the process of creating a project more accessible and inclusive,” Artur said.

According to him, Softr’s mission is to make the use of its platform as simple and fast as possible.

“We want the users to be able to realize their vision through our tools without other technologies to the most possible extent. Many of our competitors have a high threshold and depend too much on mediator tools (paid ones, in general), which significantly complicates things for the users and requires additional financial investments,” highlighted Artur.

Recent investment and plans

According to Artur, although the team already has certain results, it is just the beginning. They will use the investment to develop and improve the product, which implies expanding the team.

“We want to involve more top-quality experts, who will also bring in fresh ideas. The plan is to have a fully-fledged, multi-profile team in Armenia, which will include coders, designers, managers, marketing specialists, etc. Other interesting projects and cooperation options are also possible in the nearest future.

We also envision Softr as a more convenient and better equipped platform, which will help us attract new clients and enable more people to create value through Softr,” he added.

Softr’s vision for technological development of Armenia

Artur Mkrtchyan believes that Armenia now needs more home-produced technological solutions, because most IT specialists and teams currently work on projects ordered from abroad (which isn’t bad at all, as it creates many jobs).

“I think Armenia has the potential for creating more home-produced technological solutions. Of course, it requires an environment, investment, reforms in education and science, and other structural changes. In addition, parallel to coding we need to develop marketing, business management, design and other areas, because in order to have a successful product you need to be good in all these aspects, not just coding,” stressed Artur.

He would like to see Armenia not as solely an outsource country but as a creative force behind interesting products, technologies, and ideas.

“There seems to be positive development in that direction in recent years and a lot of great startups are emerging in Armenia, but there is still a lot to be done in terms of the overall situation. I hope Softr will have a small contribution to that and serve as a positive example, inspiring others,” added Artur.

Narine Daneghyan talked to Artur Mkrtchyan