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The First Batch of newly launched Armenia Startup Academy Traction Programme has started which is a 10-week mentorship-based programme designed to help companies at post-prototype stage with early traction to accelerate their growth and raise their first or follow-on rounds. The programme is implemented by Catalyst Foundation (https://www.catalyst.am/) supported by the European Union’s EU4Business “Technology Development for Armenia” project implemented by GIZ. Viva-MTS, Armenia’s leading telecommunications operator joins the initiative as a corporate partner and supporter.

Viva-MTS reports that throughout the 5 cycles of the Armenia Startup Academy pre-acceleration programme 65 startups have graduated. In total, less than €250K was spent during the 2,5 years on running the programme, while companies that graduated ASA disclosed raising more than €3 million of funding. While things evolve, Armenian startups start facing new challenges, which are more sophisticated by their nature. As a response to an existing need in the ecosystem for a next-level programme, Academy team has designed the Traction Programme.

Over the 10 weeks of the Traction programme, participating startups will work closely with leading professionals in Sales and Growth Hacking, establish their growth frameworks, refine and validate their strategies and get support for Fundraising and expanding to international markets. Under the light of the Covid-19 pandemic the programme will be held remotely. More information about the programme can be found here.

The first cohort of 9 companies reflects a diverse range of startups that bring new waves of innovation in industries such as edutech, transportation, media, HR, marketing and more.

The selected cohort of the first Traction Programme includes:
1. CauldronApp (https://cauldron.app/) helps companies save applicant screening and interviewing time by recruiting through challenges.
2. ConstApps (https://constapps.com/) is an E-commerce mobile application builder providing marketing solutions to allow for customer retention.
3. Dowork (https://dowork.ai/) is a collaborative platform for project time and cost estimation.
4. dzook (https://dzook.ai/) is a technology converting simple photos into illustrated portraits, which can be used in different areas such as video editing, plugins for drawing and design tools, 3D animation, etc.
5. Hub Technologies (https://www.hubtech.io/) democratizes the shipping industry and connects shippers directly with carriers without charging brokerage fees.
6. LiveBoard (https://liveboard.online/) is an interactive whiteboard application for online tutoring and distance learning.
7. Rentopian (https://rentopian.com/) is an all-in-one software for event rental business operations.
8. SmartSender (https://smartsender.io/) is an AI-powered retention marketing automation platform allowing for omni-channel customer retention.
9. TabuLearn (https://www.metric.am/) is an end-to-end provider of data science and AI services allowing anyone who has access to data to build AI models and extract actionable insight for their business.