The Foundation
Built in 2017 to lower a barrier.
CATALYST Hi-Tech and Entrepreneurship Development Foundation is an Armenian non-profit, established in 2017 by the founding partners of SmartGateVC. It exists to design and run the programs the country's technology ecosystem needs and does not otherwise have.
Why it exists
Armenia has the talent. The distance from idea to company was the problem.
Armenia produces strong engineers and strong researchers. What it lacked in 2017 was the connective infrastructure between a technical idea and a functioning company: structured pre-acceleration, mentors who had built and sold things, a physical place to work, and a route from the National Academy of Sciences into industry.
Catalyst was set up to build that connective layer and to operate it on other people's mandates - the European Union, GIZ, UNDP, EFSE, the Ministry of High-Tech Industry - rather than to run on its own balance sheet indefinitely.
The chemistry in the name is deliberate. A catalyst lowers the activation energy of a reaction and comes out of it unchanged, ready for the next one. That is the operating model: the programs are consumed by their funding cycles, the machinery that ran them is not.
That machinery is what remains available today. A hub, a network, a set of tested playbooks, and a working channel into Armenian science.
How it works
We take a mandate and deliver against it.
Catalyst is an implementer. A funder brings an objective and a budget; we design the program, run the selection, staff the delivery, and report the outcome.
Design
Curriculum, selection criteria, mentor matching and milestone structure, built to the funder's objective rather than lifted from a template.
Deliver
Recruitment, cohort management, mentor coordination, venue and demo day, staffed by us. Run out of Hero House until it closed, and portable to a new venue.
Report
Participation, completion and outcome data in the form the mandate requires. Every program in our record was reported to the institution that funded it.
The building
Hero House, 2017 to 2023.
For six years the foundation ran a dedicated innovation hub in central Yerevan. It hosted every program in our record. It is now closed.
Then Resident teams on the working floor
Demo Day The same building at capacity
- Function
- Event space, program delivery space, residency for deep-tech teams
- Used by
- Armenia Startup Academy, AI Incubator, Entrepreneurial Assistant School, ImpactAim GovTech Accelerator
- Status
- Closed. A funded program would need a venue; everything else needed to run one is intact.
Where we stand
Where things actually stand.
The largest programs ran between 2017 and 2023 and closed with their funding, but delivery did not stop there - a pre-acceleration cohort reached Demo Day in February 2025. Two initiatives are live today. We would rather set this out plainly than imply a cadence we are not running.
- Live
Science and Technology Convergence Platform - operating at partial capacity on foundation resources
- Live
Recoverable grants for early-stage and R&D companies, with the EFSE Development Facility - run by SmartGateVC
- Standing
The mentor network, the alumni pipeline, the program playbooks and the academic channel
- Closed
Hero House, the hub in central Yerevan that hosted the programs from 2017
- Dormant
Armenia Startup Academy and the other program formats - playbooks intact, awaiting a mandate
- Paused
Convergence Conference - last held in 2022
If you have a mandate, we have the machinery.
We are looking for institutional partners - development finance, government programs, corporate foundations - who need a delivery vehicle in Armenia that already exists and has already reported. Tell us the mandate and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right implementer.