Aram Shakhbandaryan

Projects

Seven companies and products since 2014. Two are running, five are closed. Dates, numbers and current status for each.

2026 to nowDecato

Interior design workflow software, co-founded with Vladimir Borisov. It takes a floor plan and a brief, lays out an editable room, sources products that exist and fit the dimensions, and assembles a specification a client can approve and a supplier can quote.

Fifty users to date. The average first session runs about six hours. First paying customer in the US.

Walls, then rooms with their areas, then furniture with product names attached. Twenty seconds, no cuts. Longer version on decato.ai, plus a three-minute pitch from the Plug and Play Batch 3 Expo in Yerevan, July 2026.

Completed Plug and Play Armenia's third pre-acceleration programme, which closed with an expo in July 2026. The Armenian Ministry of High-Tech Industry listed the cohort.

2026 to nowHermes

An operations agent running on a private VPS, built on the open-source Hermes Agent framework. It handles the recurring work across my companies and I run it from Telegram, one thread per subject, with memory that persists across months.

Twenty-two scheduled jobs in production. Nine cover Decato: Search Console pulls, an indexation watchdog, technical checks, a content backlog, a weekly operations report, lead digests and conversion alerts. The rest draft the weekly investor update, sweep stale follow-ups, run a daily finance check-in, and maintain the system itself through a nightly backup and a guarded weekly update.

I also teach the setup. The first session in Yerevan drew thirty people and five volunteer mentors; AI9 Startup Campus hosted the next in May 2026, with attendees required to arrive with a server provisioned and SSH working.

2021 to 2026Empy.ai

Conversation AI for high-stakes calls, co-founded and led as CEO. It began as a transformer fine-tuned to separate evaluation from observation in written speech at 82% F1, shipped as a Slack bot for team communication, and became a macOS application that ran during live calls.

The Empy panel during a call: a talk-time split, engagement states for both sides, a needs detector reading clarity and support, and a question detected from the conversation
Live call. Talk-time split, engagement state for both sides, detected needs, and questions surfaced from the conversation as they are asked.

Four thousand users. $165,000 pre-seed. 43 companies through pilots and subscriptions. Second product of the day on Product Hunt. Finalist at Burning Heroes 2024 in San Francisco with a live pitch at Plug and Play Silicon Valley. US pilots with Erickson Coaching International and Facility Solutions Group. Draper University, then Plug and Play Armenia.

The Electron client had stability problems that cost retention, and was rewritten in Swift in February 2026. Closed in May 2026. The product site remains online.

2022Housing search bot

A Telegram bot for the 2022 relocation wave to Armenia. It aggregated rental listings and matched them against what people specified, with a distribution channel around it.

Built and sold within three weeks for $10,000. The channel remains active with over six thousand members.

2020 to 2025Retreat Zone

A communication training practice, then a venture built on it. The practice ran four-day residential programmes for technology managers: nonviolent communication workshops, morning Ashtanga, movement and group work, at $1,700 per participant.

The Retreat at Aram's landing page: four days of deep rest in a safe space, May 1 to 4, $1,700, a mindfulness retreat for tech managers
One of the programmes, with the four-day agenda and pricing.

Fourteen programmes delivered, plus individual coaching. Over three hundred people trained in nonviolent communication. $70,000 in revenue across one six-month period, and roughly five times the startup's revenue over the same years.

Retreat Zone was the productised version: an aggregator handling selection, fit and logistics for first-time attendees. Incorporated in Delaware, first investor check raised. Discontinued in 2025.

before 2016Earlier ventures

Digital agency, from eighteen. Websites and marketing, run while still at school and through university.

Ad agency, at twenty-one. Over $4,000 a month. Closed within a year.

First technology startup, at twenty-three. Closed. Two full-time roles taken afterwards to clear the debt.