Armenia not only benefits from its talented labor pool of technolgists, scientists, and start up geniuses, but also the business and industry expertise of pioneering Armenians from the Diaspora. These award-winning, highly respected tech titans bring deep know-how in indispensable areas of tech research, development and innovation as well as access to capital resources. Their inspired leadership—whether as entrepreneurs, corporate decision makers or start up powerbrokers, put them in a league of their own.
Best of all, they all share a passion for helping their ancestral homeland meet its full potential to achieve prosperity and security at home while contributing as a change agent for the advancement of humankind.
Noubar Afeyan
Noubar Afeyan is one of the most consequential figures at the intersection of science, entrepreneurship, and global health. Born in Beirut, he fled the Lebanese Civil War as a child, eventually settling in Montreal before pursuing a PhD in biochemical engineering at MIT, completing it in 1987.
He is the founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, an enterprise that has developed more than 100 scientific ventures resulting in over $100 billion in aggregate value, thousands of patents, and more than 50 drugs in clinical development.
Afeyan co-founded Moderna in 2009 and currently serves as its chairman. In 2018, Moderna achieved the biggest IPO in biotech history, and in 2021, he announced that Moderna would not enforce its patent rights against anyone using them to produce COVID-19 vaccines. He was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2025.
Across three decades, Afeyan built more than 70 life science and technology startups and been elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He also taught technology entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan and Harvard Business School for over 20 years.
He is a founding supporter of both the IDeA Foundation and FAST—the Foundation for Armenian Science and Technology and serves as a strategic advisor to Armenia’s landmark $4 billion AI infrastructure initiative, which PM Pashinyan called the country’s “Stargate.” In 2015, Afeyan co-founded the Aurora Humani-tarian Initiative, which awards $1 million annually to individuals who risk their lives to protect others.
Dr. Yervant Zorian
Born in Aleppo and a resident of Silicon Valley, California, Dr. Zorian is hailed as a trailblazing engineer, educator, and Armenian community leader. His career has shaped the global semiconductor industry while leaving a lasting mark on his ancestral Armenian homeland. He was among the first to recognize Armenia’s IT potential in the early 1990s, helping open the country to foreign technology companies after independence in 1991. He currently serves as Chief Architect and Fellow at Synopsys and President of Synopsys Armenia.
He holds an MS in Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California, a PhD in Electrical Engineering from McGill University, and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.
His core area of expertise lies in self-testing and self-repairing semiconductor chips. As he explains: “Today’s semiconductor manufacturing is very precise, but not perfect. As a result, most chips are manufactured with defects in them. This is why we create intelligent engines that allow a chip to test and repair itself.” He holds more than 40 U.S. patents, has authored four books, and published over 350 refereed papers.
Zorian received the 2005 Industrial Pioneer Award for his contributions to Built-In Self-Test technology, the 2006 Hans Karlsson Award for Diplomacy, and in 2014, the Republic of Armenia’s National Medal of Science.
He was elected to the AGBU Central Board of Directors in 2008, and is the founding president of the AGBU Armenian Virtual College (AVC), through which over 39,000 students worldwide have taken classes. He also serves on the Board of Trustees of the American University of Armenia (AUA) and is a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia. In recognition of this work, the mayor of Santa Clara in California, declared September 1st “Dr. Yervant Zorian Day.”
Today’s semiconductor manufacturing is very precise, but not perfect. As a result, most chips are manufactured with defects in them. This is why we create intelligent engines that allow a chip to test and repair itself.
Rev Lebaredian
Rev Lebaredian is a grandmaster of computer graphics, simulation technology, and artificial intelligence, with more than three decades at the frontier of digital innovation. He currently serves as the vice president of Omniverse and Simulation Technology at NVIDIA.
He began his career specializing in rendering for Warner Bros. Digital and Disney’s Dream Quest Images, developing the renderer used for the Academy Award-nominated film Mighty Joe Young. He later founded Steamboat Software, creating the award-winning renderer “Jig,” adopted by major visual effects studios including Sony ImageWorks, Walt Disney, and Rhythm and Hues Studios. His volumetric algorithms powered beloved films including Stuart Little, Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and X2: X-Men United.
In 2002, he transitioned to NVIDIA, helping create the Cg shading language, before being relocated to Moscow to open a new office, where he architected NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience platform. Over the years, his teams tackled challenges spanning automated testing of 3D applications, real-time physics simulation (PhysX), in-game photography (Ansel), robotics simulation (Isaac Sim), and immersive product design. More recently, he has led the integration of NVIDIA’s rendering, physics, and AI capabilities into a single platform—NVIDIA Omniverse.
Lebaredian has become the driving force behind NVIDIA’s landmark partnership with Armenia. After relocating NVIDIA’s Russian office to Yerevan in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he helped cultivate a relationship between Jensen Huang and Prime Minister Pashinyan. In June 2025, at NVIDIA GTC Paris, he was present at the formal announcement of Firebird’s $500 million public-private partnership with the Armenian government.
By February 2026, with U.S. Vice President JD Vance present, the project had scaled to $4 billion and 50,000 NVIDIA GPUs, positioning Armenia as home to one of the world’s five largest AI GPU clusters. Lebaredian noted that, “Armenia will be among the first countries in the world to have an AI factory of this kind, and those who know how to build and operate AI factories hold a distinct global advantage.”
Lebaredian also serves on the Board of Trustees the American University of Armenia and the Advisory Board of the TUMO Center for Creative Technologies.
Sam Simonian
Sam Simonian was born in Beirut, Lebanon into an Armenian diaspora community where he grew up before relocating to the United States to pursue higher education. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington and soon began working in telecommunications and engineering.
In 1989, Simonian co‑founded INET Technologies, Inc., a telecommunications company focused on network management and business operational systems, with partners including Elie Akilian and Mark Weinzierl. Through rapid innovation and growth in the early 1990s, INET became known for delivering solutions to major carriers and technology firms. Simonian’s leadership was widely recognized: in 1994 he was named Entrepreneur of the Year by Inc. magazine, Ernst & Young and Merrill Lynch, and he later received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor as well as Armenia’s Anania Shirakatsi Medal for contributions to the Armenian community and global technological advancement.
Beyond INET, Simonian is best known as co-founder of the TUMO Center for Creative Technologies in Yerevan. TUMO —a free after‑school educational program that teaches programming, robotics, animation, and digital design—opened its flagship center in Yerevan in 2011 and has since expanded internationally to cities across Europe and North America. He also chairs the boards of the TUMO Foundation and Teach For Armenia, connecting educational innovation with broader national development objectives. In 2024, after serving many years in AGBU leadership, he was elected its eighth president.
