From Live Seafood to Lines of Code: Aram Minasyan's Relentless Pursuit of Market Gaps

Authored by James Carnell  Across industries, go-to-market playbooks are being rewritten by converging pressures: rising customer-acquisition costs, fragmented media channels, and supply chains that are still recalibrating after years of shocks. Growth no longer comes from simply “doing more”—it comes from diagnosing friction that slows value creation and then instrumenting processes to remove it. The companies breaking through are those that treat business development as an operations discipline: measure constraints, shorten cycle times, and build partnerships that compound distribution advantages over time. What follows is a case study of that mindset in practice.

Ask Aram Minasyan how he decides where to place his next bet, and he answers with a shrug: “I just look for bottlenecks everyone else is overlooking,” he says. At 38, the Armenian-born entrepreneur has already built three very different companies by doing exactly that.

His first big swing was Chef Omar, launched in 2017 to bring King crabs, different types of oysters, anadara, spizula, vongole, mussels, and more to land-locked Yerevan restaurants. “No one believed we could run a cold-chain that long without losses,” Minasyan recalls. The gamble coincided with a broader boom in global demand for ultra-fresh seafood: the live-seafood segment alone was valued at US $63.6 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow 6.5 percent annually through 2034.

By designing insulated tanks that mimicked the Bering Sea’s mineral balance, Chef Omar cut spoilage to single digits and became a must-have supplier for Yerevan’s upscale kitchens. Minasyan credits the venture with teaching him “how to build a supply chain before you build demand.”

Chef Omar didn’t just ship delicacies; it reset expectations across Armenia’s hospitality sector. Reliable access to live seafood enabled restaurants to upgrade tasting menus, introduce raw bars, and stage seasonal promotions that previously weren’t feasible inland. That, in turn, lifted cover counts and average check sizes, incentivising culinary teams to experiment with provenance-driven dishes and pairings. As supply stabilised, mid-tier restaurants could participate too, broadening consumer choice beyond a handful of white-tablecloth venues.

The ripple effects extended to business fundamentals. Consistent, year-round availability helped chefs plan inventory with fewer last-minute substitutions, reducing waste and improving margins. Vendor consolidation—accessing a variety of live seafood through Chef Omar, rather than relying on multiple importers supplying frozen or limited shipments—simplified procurement and eliminated the urgency of same-day consumption. By maintaining a live inventory, Chef Omar gave restaurants flexibility, consistency, and control that hadn’t existed before. For hotels and event caterers, dependable seafood programs became a differentiator for conferences and weddings, nudging the wider tourism offering up-market.

On the demand side, fresher proteins at accessible price points meant more households encountered premium seafood outside special-occasion dining. On the supply side, Chef Omar’s predictable purchasing schedules gave source fisheries clearer forward visibility, while local logistics partners—freight handlers, customs brokers, cold-storage operators—saw steadier volumes. The company also collaborated with culinary schools on workshops covering safe handling and live-tank maintenance, raising industry standards and transferable skills across the workforce.

Behind the scenes, Chef Omar treated live-seafood logistics as an engineering problem. Modular aquaria with redundant aeration and inline filtration maintained salinity and pH windows tailored to each species. IoT telemetry tracked temperature, dissolved oxygen, and ammonia from dock to kitchen, with route-optimization software and exception alerts guiding interventions during transit. Fail-safes—backup power, oxygen reservoirs, and rapid-swap cartridges—reduced downtime risk at handoff points. Pairing that hardware stack with disciplined SOPs turned a fragile cold-chain into a repeatable service product—an early preview of how Minasyan would later approach software.

That lesson proved useful when Minasyan pivoted to software. In 2022 he founded ITAI LLC, a boutique AI-engineering house targeting US and Gulf-region clients. Armenia’s tech sector was heating up—65 local IT firms together paid AMD 17.3 billion (about US $44 million) in taxes in the first quarter of 2023, a five-percent slice of total government revenue.

Within twelve months ITAI ranked 18th on the State Revenue Committee’s IT top-taxpayer list, rubbing shoulders with multinationals like NVIDIA and Adobe. “We didn’t chase headcount; we chased high-margin problems,” Minasyan explains, pointing to projects such as custom automation software and intelligent process optimization tools that replaced repetitive manual tasks. Analysts say ITAI’s ascent mirrors Armenia’s wider digital surge. Worldwide ad-spending forecasts indicate that total media outlays will top the US $1-trillion mark this year, with more than 75 percent flowing to digital channels. Minasyan argues this trend makes niche engineering talent in smaller markets invaluable: “When global demand for digital capacity outpaces supply, geography stops mattering—execution doesn’t.”

Minasyan’s newest venture, Three Orcas, launched in Los Angeles earlier this year to help mid-market companies ride that digital-spending wave. The agency blends web development, SEO, and video production—disciplines Minasyan once stitched together piecemeal for his own firms—into a single retainer model.

“Founders don’t need ten vendors; they need one partner who speaks growth,” he says. Early clients include a California plant-based snack line and a Gulf fintech that previously relied on three agencies for content, code, and ad-ops. Industry watchers note that Minasyan’s timing is shrewd. U.S. retail-media alone is on track to hit US $109 billion by 2027, more than double 2023 levels. “Performance channels are fragmenting; full-funnel orchestration is the new moat,” Minasyan contends.

Raised in Yerevan and armed with an MBA from the American University of Armenia plus a PhD in economics, Minasyan toggles easily between balance-sheet detail and big-picture rhetoric. Friends describe him as “restlessly curious”—a label he embraces. “Whether it’s live seafood or large-language models, the math is the same: spot friction, design a process, then let operators scale it,” he says.

He also mentors early-stage founders at Armenia’s Engineering City incubator and is lobbying for revised customs rules to speed perishable imports—an echo of his Chef Omar days. “Innovation policy can’t stop at software,” he warns, arguing that diversified trade keeps small economies resilient.