Yeva Hyusyan and the classroom that fit in a pocket

The coding course had to pass through Yeva Hyusyan first. Her co-founder, Davit Kocharyan, was the engineer. He would put a lesson together; she would try to learn it. If she could not follow, they went back over it. Publication came after comprehension. For a company teaching beginners, it was a useful arrangement: somebody at the top still remembered what the bottom looked like.

Hyusyan had studied economics and business. She had worked in development programs and at Microsoft. Coding professionally was somebody else’s expertise. Yet that gap gave the early Sololearn a working method. The person responsible for the business could also be the person asking why a piece of the lesson made no sense.

There is an appealing lack of ceremony here. No elaborate portrait of the ideal learner was necessary when one of the founders was sitting the exam. Sololearn would eventually report registrations in the tens of millions. Its early quality check was much smaller: had Yeva understood?

A school with a space problem

The route to that small screen began in Armenia. Hyusyan grew up in the Soviet Union, in a family that valued education. Her later accounts describe university study after its collapse, including learning by candlelight when electricity was unavailable. Education mattered intensely even when the conditions for it were poor. That history gives a particular weight to her subsequent interest in making learning easier to reach.

She first worked in development, including USAID, before moving toward technology. Her qualifications include an MS in International Economics from Yerevan State University, an MBA from Maastricht School of Management, and an executive program at Stanford Graduate School of Business. The educational route was substantial; the company she later built would offer people something they could start between other obligations.

In 2010, she joined Microsoft’s innovation center in Armenia. The work included a startup accelerator, with student teams making products ranging from games to robots and agricultural tools. A coding bootcamp helped support the operation. People learned skills that employers wanted. Success created a practical problem: teaching more people meant finding more rooms and more instructors.

The rooms could keep multiplying. The founders chose to change the delivery system. Sololearn’s company history reaches back to 2013; the mobile product launched in 2014. Hyusyan and Kocharyan were taking a locally useful experience and asking how much of it could travel through a phone.

The co-founder takes the test

The phone imposed its own discipline. A classroom can accommodate a long explanation, a blackboard and a raised hand. A lesson on a small screen has to make choices. What is the next thing the learner needs to understand? What can they try immediately? Where is the point at which an explanation has quietly become a lecture?

Hyusyan’s admiration for teachers who could simplify difficult material informed that work. She has recalled a mathematics teacher who made a concept clear with remarkable speed. Her own part in testing Sololearn’s courses carried the same concern into the product. Understanding supplied the finish line, and revision was part of getting there.

“Coding is the new literacy”

Yeva Hyusyan

Her claim about coding reaches beyond a future full of software engineers. People in other jobs also deal with technical systems, repetitive tasks and data. Knowing something about code can change how they approach that work. For Hyusyan, an economics graduate learning the logic of programming, the intended audience included people whose careers had begun elsewhere.

By 2021, she was discussing courses tailored to occupations, including marketing, alongside programming languages. HTML and CSS could be taught in relation to work a marketer already recognized. This is a more concrete invitation than asking everyone to acquire an entirely new professional identity. Start with the task in front of you. Learn enough to do something with it.

The investor who became a learner

Running a company required another education. Hyusyan has described the unfamiliar conventions of venture capital: the meetings, the revisions to the pitch, the difficulty of converting interest into money. Early traction could get her into a conversation without getting a deal over the line.

In her telling, an opening at Learn Capital arrived through a pleasing coincidence. A partner wanted to learn Python and found Sololearn. He tried the product. The conversation resumed, and the round closed. A person evaluating an education business had also become a person receiving its education.

There were more prosaic forms of help along the way. Hyusyan has singled out an early $50,000 World Bank grant for its usefulness in paying developers and helping the company reach a wider market. The later rounds were larger. The earlier money arrived when basic expenses were the immediate obstacle. Timing has a way of editing the importance of a number.

In July 2021, Sololearn announced a $24 million Series B led by Drive Capital, with Learn Capital and Prosus Ventures participating. It reported 21 million registered users. Those figures describe a particular moment in the business. They also mark how far the project had travelled from the bootcamp’s problem of finding another classroom.

A little less solo

One complication was already present in the name. Sololearn sounds like an invitation to study alone. The experience developed around people answering questions, sharing code and learning from each other. Someone working independently could still need another person at precisely the moment an exercise stopped making sense.

Hyusyan has described an early misreading of that activity. The founders began thinking of the product as a social gathering place for coders. They came to see that learning gave those relationships their purpose. A conversation needed something to be about. Making progress supplied the reason to be there.

That is a useful distinction for a business with community features. Conversation can become an activity that rewards itself, with plenty happening and little being learned. In Hyusyan’s account, the educational work had to stay at the center. Relationships could form around a shared task, a question or a piece of code.

Her comments about mentors extend the idea beyond the app. She has urged founders to find people who have faced comparable problems at different stages of building a business. Useful help depends partly on recognizing the situation. The founder struggling with an unfamiliar investor conversation and the learner facing an unfamiliar programming concept both have reasons to ask someone who has been there.

Four phones, very few illusions

For all the talk about access through mobile devices, Hyusyan’s relationship with the devices themselves is refreshingly workaday. She has joked about finding four phones in her purse. Different platforms required working tools. She expressed no particular attachment to a brand and said she sometimes put the gadgets aside.

A mobile founder’s handbag apparently has room for a small testing department. The detail is funny because it brings the work down to earth. Someone has to know how the thing behaves on the devices people actually own. A grand statement about the future offers limited help with that afternoon’s practical questions.

Her 2017 TEDxYerevan talk examined the familiar instructions for becoming successful: think big, stay passionate, fail and work extraordinarily long hours. She proposed looking instead at the relationship between a person’s ambitions and potential. The talk leaves room for different measures of accomplishment, rather than requiring everyone to borrow the same script.

The company’s own revisions fit that outlook. Early experiments ranged beyond programming into photography, Photoshop and even makeup instruction, with separate apps to maintain. Hyusyan later described the maintenance burden and the move toward consolidation. The catalogue of possibilities had become a catalogue of responsibilities. There is a distinctly practical education in learning which ideas you can keep looking after.

The question that survived the technology

By October 2023, Hyusyan was reporting more than 30 million registrations and discussing an AI coding partner called Kodie. Its proposed jobs included explaining code, helping with bugs and answering questions. In another interview that year, she described translating compiler errors into language a beginner could understand. The technology had changed; the point of confusion was familiar.

Her October 2024 appearance on BigStory Podcast returned to the work of building the company: growth, retention, founder decisions and AI. Getting someone to arrive and helping them continue are separate demands. For a learning business, the second one keeps asking for attention long after the registration has been counted.

Organizers listed her for the 2024 Madrid Startup Conference’s scaleup panel, and AGBU Young Professionals Madrid announced her for a March 2026 discussion of Armenian women’s leadership alongside Nina Khalatyan. The subjects extend beyond the app, into the experience of building a career and a company.

Today Sololearn’s catalogue includes both programming and AI subjects, from Python and SQL to prompt engineering. Hyusyan’s stated ambition has remained broad: help people acquire skills that enrich their working lives. The practical question inside that ambition is wonderfully specific. When somebody opens a lesson and cannot follow, what happens next?

At the beginning, Yeva Hyusyan could ask that question as the learner herself. Her co-founder could revise the explanation. A company that reaches people around the world needs many more ways to hear the same question. The original test remains available, however sophisticated the tools become: can the person in front of the lesson understand it?