“We don’t have sufficient high quality flats for remarkably educated people today with large salaries and substantial standards,” reported Aram Shahbandarian, a previous Google staff based mostly in Yerevan who is helping numerous Russians transfer to the metropolis. “Yerevan is cracking.”
Vahan Kerobyan, Armenia’s overall economy minister, reported in an interview that as a place with a strategic romantic relationship with Russia, it was not marketing and advertising alone as hoping to pull firms out of Russia, but that if corporations made the decision to transfer, it would get the job done to accommodate them.
“The Armenian tech neighborhood is offering support to their Russian buddies, and the governing administration is extremely considerably nervous about offering Russian firms a nice spot that is not as well high-priced the place they can work,” he mentioned. Mr. Kerobyan believed that 43,000 men and women had moved from Russia to Armenia, half of whom hold Russian passports and fifty percent Armenian passports.
Miro, a U.S. software package company, chartered flights to Yerevan for its Russian workers and moved them into two inns in the heart of the city, Mr. Kerobyan claimed. X-tensive, a software improvement enterprise in Russia, has also moved its staff to the Armenian city since its main customer, ServiceTitan, has an office there, he stated.
Miro has stated publicly that it was going its employees out of Russia. X-tensive did not reply to a request for remark.
Russia-Ukraine War: Key Developments
Several of those people personnel could inevitably shift on to other sites for the reason that visa restrictions require them to go away their existing house right after a specific number of days. A lot of are not sure exactly where they may possibly go. Some others are preparing moves to up-and-coming tech hubs farther absent, these kinds of as Dubai and Lisbon.
Artem Taganov, founder and chief executive of a Russian begin-up named HintEd, stated he understood about 70 founders of Russian companies who, like him, experienced fled to Armenia. If business people stay in Russia, he claimed, their firms can serve only the local market place.