
Wirestock began by removing the paperwork from stock photography. Its CEO is now trying to solve a larger bargain: how creators get paid when their work helps machines learn.
Rema (Hripsime) Matevosyan is the co-founder and CEO of Near Space Labs, a Brooklyn-based company that flies helium-lifted robotic aircraft called Swift into the stratosphere to photograph the Earth at 7-centimeter resolution. Born and educated in Armenia, trained as an applied mathematician in Moscow, she left a PhD program two weeks into an entrepreneurship class to build what she calls her own little space program. In April 2025 the company closed a $20M Series B led by Bold Capital Partners, bringing total funding above $40M, with insurance carriers as anchor customers using the imagery to model wildfire and hurricane damage.
Hrant Gharibyan is the co-founder and CEO of BlueQubit, a San Francisco quantum-software-as-a-service startup he launched in 2022 with Hayk Tepanyan. A theoretical physicist trained at MIT, Stanford (PhD under Leonard Susskind), and Caltech (in John Preskill's group), he co-authored a wormhole-teleportation algorithm that Google Quantum AI later ran on a real superconducting processor. BlueQubit builds GPU-accelerated emulators and a cloud platform that lets enterprises design and run quantum algorithms, and raised a $10M seed round in December 2024 led by Nyca Partners.