Vahan Petrosyan

Vahan Petrosyan is co-founder and chief executive of SuperAnnotate, which sells annotation software, evaluation tools, and access to a vetted network of human experts to companies training AI models. He is Armenian, did doctoral research on image segmentation in Stockholm, Sweden, and started the company with his brother Tigran from an algorithm he developed there.

One algorithm at KTH

At KTH Royal Institute of Technology his PhD research produced an image labeling tool. “We were thinking, we can build a business based on one algorithm,” he told Dell Technologies Capital. He later called that a wrong assumption that still gave the team a starting point.

The first plan was to use the technology in image editing apps. With coaching from KTH Innovation, the team moved toward annotation and, with KTH student Oscar Örnberg, built the first product.

From Sevan to Silicon Valley

In 2018 the brothers won Armenia’s Sevan Startup Summit, then left their PhD programs and moved to Yerevan to build the company, according to Granatus Ventures, which invested. They finished KTH Innovation Launch in October 2019, joined the Berkeley SkyDeck accelerator, and moved to Silicon Valley. “We were research people who had to turn into business people,” he said.

Tigran led the company as chief executive in its early years while Vahan ran technology. Vahan now leads it.

Human data for frontier AI

SuperAnnotate now calls itself “the human data company for frontier AI.” He says grading AI output is rarely clean, because “there could be 10,000 different right answers to a question in an interaction.” Databricks, founded by former KTH assistant professor Ali Ghodsi, is one of its largest customers.