Two days after raising her seed round, Naré Vardanyan discovered she was pregnant. The timing couldn't have been more challenging—or more perfectly symbolic of her journey as an entrepreneur who refuses to settle.
Vardanyan is the CEO and co-founder of Ntropy, an AI startup that builds language models to understand financial data at scale. Born during Armenia's war-torn independence from the Soviet Union, she survived years without electricity and transformed that adversity into an unshakeable optimism that would later fuel a company now serving 100 customers and growing at 400% annually.
In this raw and revealing interview, Vardanyan opens up about navigating imposter syndrome in AI, the brutal pivot from a failed mental health startup, and the internal demons she faced when pregnancy collided with her founder identity. Her story reveals how war survivors become unstoppable entrepreneurs—and why never settling might be the most dangerous advantage of all.
Watch the full interview now on EO's YouTube channel! Below is the complete transcription of the interview. Minor edits have been made for clarity and readability.
Key Highlights:
"I was born in Armenia. It's a small country in the southern Caucasus. A war broke out, so I was that generation that lived through the war. We didn't have electricity for a few years, like a couple of hours a day, but I would say hope is an important thing and believing that there's a lot of good in the world and the world is a beautiful place and there's so much out there."
"That type of optimism is the most important thing and sometimes you can find that optimism. Situations where people are very, very desperate and the conditions are terrible and that optimism leads them to better places, so not losing that."
"That type of optimism is the most important thing and sometimes you can find that optimism. Situations where people are very, very desperate and the conditions are terrible and that optimism leads them to better places, so not losing that."
From War-Torn Armenia to AI Dreams
Tell us about your background and how you ended up founding Ntropy.
Naré: Hi, I'm Nare. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Ntropy. At Ntropy, we build language models to understand financial data at scale regardless of source, format, language, and currency. We have raised over $14 million US dollars. The company has been live for about 3 years now, and we have 100 customers.
I was born in Armenia. It's a small country in the Southern Caucasus. When I was born, it was the year when the Soviet Union collapsed and all the states that were part of the union became independent. A war broke out, so I was that generation that lived through the war. We didn't have electricity. We had it for a few years, like a couple of hours a day. I remember as a kid we used to get so excited because the lights were on and there were certain things you could do and hot water. That was definitely tough.
There was always this idea and knowledge that our brothers and soldiers are fighting on the border, so we should make sacrifices so that they could be successful there. So people were brought up with that feeling and definitely want to get out of it, and that's a huge motivator because you're not OK with where you are and what you're doing and with the environment. That's definitely a motivator to try things and yes to want to get out and do something bigger.
I was born in Armenia. It's a small country in the Southern Caucasus. When I was born, it was the year when the Soviet Union collapsed and all the states that were part of the union became independent. A war broke out, so I was that generation that lived through the war. We didn't have electricity. We had it for a few years, like a couple of hours a day. I remember as a kid we used to get so excited because the lights were on and there were certain things you could do and hot water. That was definitely tough.
There was always this idea and knowledge that our brothers and soldiers are fighting on the border, so we should make sacrifices so that they could be successful there. So people were brought up with that feeling and definitely want to get out of it, and that's a huge motivator because you're not OK with where you are and what you're doing and with the environment. That's definitely a motivator to try things and yes to want to get out and do something bigger.
How did growing up in that environment shape your worldview and ambitions?
Naré: I grew up there until I was 7. The very first time I actually left Armenia was being a part of a public speaking competition when I was 14 or 15, and I came to the UK and was part of Edinburgh's program. Since then, when I got back, I thought, you know, the world is much bigger. There are so many different people. There's so much to do, and I definitely want to be a part of it.
There was a program called Young Professionals at the United Nations, and you had to apply. Before that, I was doing a lot of volunteering, working with United Nations associations who are a body of the UN but not officially associated with them, and I applied. I knew a lot of people who were running sort of the eligibility everything else in Armenia. I got in. That was a great opportunity to leave and get started from scratch.
There was a program called Young Professionals at the United Nations, and you had to apply. Before that, I was doing a lot of volunteering, working with United Nations associations who are a body of the UN but not officially associated with them, and I applied. I knew a lot of people who were running sort of the eligibility everything else in Armenia. I got in. That was a great opportunity to leave and get started from scratch.
The UN Dream That Wasn't
What was your experience like working at the United Nations?
Naré: I started my career at the United Nations. I was working for the UNDP focused on financial inclusion and going to the UN. This childish dream of starting volunteering and actually working for them, making a difference. So it has really shaped me in terms of wanting to live a life where I would have that type of an impact.
Obviously I was young and quite naive on what's possible and what's not, and the UN is a very big, very bureaucratic organization. So very quickly I decided that's not how I want to spend my time. And then I applied for a master's degree. That's how I ended up in London after the UN.
Obviously I was young and quite naive on what's possible and what's not, and the UN is a very big, very bureaucratic organization. So very quickly I decided that's not how I want to spend my time. And then I applied for a master's degree. That's how I ended up in London after the UN.
Discovering AI in DeepMind's Shadow
How did you first get interested in artificial intelligence?
Naré: University I was enrolled at University College London. That was the place where DeepMind, which was one of the top labs in artificial intelligence in the world, the biggest inspiration, and I think I was very lucky if you look at what's happening in AI right now, you know, the biggest innovations, etc. a lot of that has also come from that lab and the people who were involved, that atmosphere, everybody talking about that how transformative AI was, that was super fascinating, and I was close to that, so I knew that yes, I don't have a background in it, but I definitely want to be a part of that work.
It was hard because obviously you have a lot of imposter syndrome and I was doing Andrew Ng's Stanford course. It was the first time I ever came across machine learning. I remember I had to Google even simple things. I had to start from zero and Google the terms and then try to figure out what it meant and then translate it into some old mathematics knowledge that I had to be able to even get close to.
If you're growing up in a small place with a lot of political issues and conflict, the ceiling to what's possible is very low, no matter how much you try, and it seemed like here everything was possible. You just needed to find your way.
It was hard because obviously you have a lot of imposter syndrome and I was doing Andrew Ng's Stanford course. It was the first time I ever came across machine learning. I remember I had to Google even simple things. I had to start from zero and Google the terms and then try to figure out what it meant and then translate it into some old mathematics knowledge that I had to be able to even get close to.
If you're growing up in a small place with a lot of political issues and conflict, the ceiling to what's possible is very low, no matter how much you try, and it seemed like here everything was possible. You just needed to find your way.
The Mental Health Startup That Almost Was
What was your first startup experience like?
Naré: I would never think that would be the first thing I would do out of uni, so I had two options. I could go back or I could stay and start a company, and there was a really good sort of situation where you would get backing and get a visa to be an entrepreneur. I remember I registered the company and I was like, OK, I think I need to figure out what I'm going to build now.
And I was doing a lot of work with UNICEF in the UK at the same time as I was studying, and one of the biggest insights there was that young children also as they grow into teens. A lot of behavioral and mental health issues and this was creating problems at schools, especially the vulnerable ones that we were working with UNICEF.
The initial idea with Mbin was to be able to detect behavioral and mental health issues in a passive way from how they were interacting with their phones because everybody was on their phone, because if you didn't understand those issues early, then they would end up not doing well at school, having problems, getting kicked out, not being able to go to college, and so on and so forth.
And I was doing a lot of work with UNICEF in the UK at the same time as I was studying, and one of the biggest insights there was that young children also as they grow into teens. A lot of behavioral and mental health issues and this was creating problems at schools, especially the vulnerable ones that we were working with UNICEF.
The initial idea with Mbin was to be able to detect behavioral and mental health issues in a passive way from how they were interacting with their phones because everybody was on their phone, because if you didn't understand those issues early, then they would end up not doing well at school, having problems, getting kicked out, not being able to go to college, and so on and so forth.
What led to the eventual failure of that startup?
Naré: I had a co-founder who had an engineering background and was doing research specifically about bipolar disorder and how could you detect that from how people type on their phones, so we decided to combine that research and commercialize it. It was quite a journey. We were very small, had no idea what we were doing to begin with. It was just very, OK, let's try and learn, and had a lot of pivots in terms of what the product was supposed to be.
In the end it ended up being a solution that would be a part of an employer healthcare platform because that was the way we thought we could monetize it. We were working with Mercer. That was the one big customer we had privacy laws in the EU, but also like California privacy law came out. What Apple was doing with keyboards became a massive problem because now the technology almost couldn't work. You couldn't really get the data out of the phone if the majority of people are using iPhones to be able to analyze it and do anything with it.
It was like a small sort of IP acquisition and then we had to move on and we didn't make it big.
In the end it ended up being a solution that would be a part of an employer healthcare platform because that was the way we thought we could monetize it. We were working with Mercer. That was the one big customer we had privacy laws in the EU, but also like California privacy law came out. What Apple was doing with keyboards became a massive problem because now the technology almost couldn't work. You couldn't really get the data out of the phone if the majority of people are using iPhones to be able to analyze it and do anything with it.
It was like a small sort of IP acquisition and then we had to move on and we didn't make it big.
From Failure to Ntropy
How did you bounce back from that failure and eventually start Ntropy?
Naré: I did two things after that happened. First, I had this like feeling that, OK, I wanted to be an entrepreneur. We kind of did something, but it wasn't quite exactly, you know, where I wanted to be in the end, so I was just on the beginning of the journey and back to square one. At the same time, when you're running a startup, you don't get to pay yourself a lot. It had been going for a while, so I had to get a proper job that would pay, and thankfully I got involved with London Co-investment Fund and got an opportunity to do some investing and like work with entrepreneurs, which would also pay bills, which was exciting.
Then I started Ntropy a bit later with a friend of mine who I knew through the years who had a different company. I met him. He was, he had a different company that was a part of Techstars, and I met him at the demo day. We had a short introduction in that context. He had grown up in Russia and then left for Norway and then worked in the US at Microsoft Research. He did a master's and then a PhD at Stanford.
So culturally, background wise, we had quite a few things in common. We did speak Russian. That was a good conversation starter, but we both wanted to do this and we got along and we had very complementary skill sets, so we decided to give it a go.
Then I started Ntropy a bit later with a friend of mine who I knew through the years who had a different company. I met him. He was, he had a different company that was a part of Techstars, and I met him at the demo day. We had a short introduction in that context. He had grown up in Russia and then left for Norway and then worked in the US at Microsoft Research. He did a master's and then a PhD at Stanford.
So culturally, background wise, we had quite a few things in common. We did speak Russian. That was a good conversation starter, but we both wanted to do this and we got along and we had very complementary skill sets, so we decided to give it a go.
What is the core problem that Ntropy solves?
Naré: Every time we pay for something, whether it is online when we purchase something or at a point of sale, there's a trace of that created, and that trace, it's a string of text that lives in the computer of your bank, in the computer of the network that is making sure that transaction happens. Imagine every single person does probably at least 2 transactions a day. So then if a bank has millions of customers, that's quite a lot of transactions that humans have to go through one by one trying to understand what it was about, who were you paying?
A lot of the banks run on legacy systems that are over 30 years old. There are many of those systems. There's no single standard which ends up creating a very messy string of information. What we do as a company, we build language models to understand financial data at scale, so we use this technology to make that data understandable to anyone, and it's very good at generalizing compared to anything that was there before because as we've seen in the last couple of years, the larger the model, the better it is at generalizing.
A lot of the banks run on legacy systems that are over 30 years old. There are many of those systems. There's no single standard which ends up creating a very messy string of information. What we do as a company, we build language models to understand financial data at scale, so we use this technology to make that data understandable to anyone, and it's very good at generalizing compared to anything that was there before because as we've seen in the last couple of years, the larger the model, the better it is at generalizing.
The Chicken and Egg Problem
How did you overcome the initial challenge of not having enough data to train your models?
Naré: When you're getting started, you don't have data, and it's very hard for a computer to do a good job if it hasn't seen good examples before. So you have this chicken and egg problem. OK, you're trying to make bad data good, but you don't have good examples. So how are you going to do it?
Our first data set we actually created. We had a consumer web page where we would help people understand their own bank transactions, so we would ask people to upload those transactions and we would help them understand what it was about. That was the first sort of data set that we trained on. It was very, very small.
Once we did that, then it was all driven. The first customers that tested with us, they would provide data. We weren't very good at understanding it because the model hadn't seen much data. I think the biggest thing that we got right was giving it into the hands of customers straight away, and they would use it. And the results were questionable. However, it made our system better because the more data was coming and the more the customers were testing it, the better the system was getting, and that was quite a journey, I think.
Our first data set we actually created. We had a consumer web page where we would help people understand their own bank transactions, so we would ask people to upload those transactions and we would help them understand what it was about. That was the first sort of data set that we trained on. It was very, very small.
Once we did that, then it was all driven. The first customers that tested with us, they would provide data. We weren't very good at understanding it because the model hadn't seen much data. I think the biggest thing that we got right was giving it into the hands of customers straight away, and they would use it. And the results were questionable. However, it made our system better because the more data was coming and the more the customers were testing it, the better the system was getting, and that was quite a journey, I think.
What was one of the key lessons you learned about product positioning?
Naré: One thing that we realized a bit later than I would want us to is if you're building a very horizontal platform, data for anything, anywhere to solve any financial services problems, it's very hard to market it to make it easy to understand and to get it into the hands of the right people. It's almost always easier to start from niche and then expand and we didn't want to compromise for a while because we knew that we need to have diverse data sources we need to be able to do different things so we didn't want to compromise.
It took us a while to actually say, OK, we can do this horizontally, but now let's focus on the areas that we want to double down on even though the product is applicable to everything, you need to have a very defined customer type that you're selling to, very defined language on how you're selling to them and how you're solving the problem before you go fully horizontal.
It took us a while to actually say, OK, we can do this horizontally, but now let's focus on the areas that we want to double down on even though the product is applicable to everything, you need to have a very defined customer type that you're selling to, very defined language on how you're selling to them and how you're solving the problem before you go fully horizontal.
When Pregnancy Met Entrepreneurship
You mentioned finding out you were pregnant right after raising your seed round. How did that impact you?
Naré: When I raised our seed round two days after the money hit the bank account, I found out that I was pregnant. I hadn't specifically planned it. It was extremely challenging from so many different perspectives. You know, you have different identities as a person. You have your identity as a CEO and founder. You have your identity as someone's mom, and then you're also a woman who's going through this.
Honestly, I think it's an insane transformation in any possible way, and you have to match all those identities together, I was very scared, and one of the things that I was scared about is that I was not going to do a great job. I wasn't going to do a great job as a mom, as well as a consequence, because I thought I would have resentment if I did fail in one part of my life, and then that would sort of become resentment, and I was very scared about telling people.
I remember it was quite a journey talking to our board and even talking to my co-founder. I think my own reaction on how people would react and what I owed to other people and the fact that I had to be like, you know, strong and not show that I feel bad physically or mentally, etc. you know those were things that I was afraid of, but as soon as I talked to other people you know they were very, very supportive. I think fighting those demons internally definitely took some time.
Honestly, I think it's an insane transformation in any possible way, and you have to match all those identities together, I was very scared, and one of the things that I was scared about is that I was not going to do a great job. I wasn't going to do a great job as a mom, as well as a consequence, because I thought I would have resentment if I did fail in one part of my life, and then that would sort of become resentment, and I was very scared about telling people.
I remember it was quite a journey talking to our board and even talking to my co-founder. I think my own reaction on how people would react and what I owed to other people and the fact that I had to be like, you know, strong and not show that I feel bad physically or mentally, etc. you know those were things that I was afraid of, but as soon as I talked to other people you know they were very, very supportive. I think fighting those demons internally definitely took some time.
The Philosophy of Never Settling
What advice would you give to other entrepreneurs?
Naré: I'm always very scared of giving generic advice, but I would say hope is an important thing, believing that there's a lot of good in the world and the world is a beautiful place. Like that type of optimism is like the most important thing, and sometimes you can find that optimism in situations where people are very, very desperate and the conditions are terrible, and that optimism leads them to better places. So not losing that, I think is very important.
If you think about it, I mean, we're in New York City right now, we look out of the window, there's all of these buildings, cars, advertising, everything that we're surrounded by in the human world was created. Entrepreneurship is the journey of making those things. It sometimes can be complicated. It's resource intensive. It requires humans and collaboration, but at the end of the day it is making things. It doesn't have to be a product necessarily or something physical or even software. It can also be an experience, but at the heart of it is still this creation, something wasn't there before, and you make it happen.
If you think about it, I mean, we're in New York City right now, we look out of the window, there's all of these buildings, cars, advertising, everything that we're surrounded by in the human world was created. Entrepreneurship is the journey of making those things. It sometimes can be complicated. It's resource intensive. It requires humans and collaboration, but at the end of the day it is making things. It doesn't have to be a product necessarily or something physical or even software. It can also be an experience, but at the heart of it is still this creation, something wasn't there before, and you make it happen.
What's your personal philosophy when it comes to life and career?
Naré: I never want to settle if that can be framed as a goal. The reason I said it was tough learning that I was going to be a mom while being an entrepreneur is there was this fear of settling, of having to stop who I was and what I was and thinking that, OK, now I cannot do the things I want to do. It's happened on a few other occasions in my life and I've realized that no, you don't have to, and that ability to continue, you know, not settling for what is, but trying different things and trying to get to more places is important. That's definitely my goal.
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