Quantum Physicist-Turned-CEO: Why Latvia Is the Perfect Launchpad for European Tech Ambitions

Imagine a green, innovation-driven country on the shores of the Baltic Sea, where foreign entrepreneurs feel at home from their very first day. This is how Latvia is described by Anna Shahinyan, a quantum physicist with a PhD and the co-founder and CEO of FiveBrane. Her story is not only about the medicine of the future, but also about Latvia’s emergence as a safe and supportive starting point for building businesses across Europe. 

FiveBrane is a smart platform for medical AI teams. It helps them work quickly and safely with images – from X‑rays to MRI, histopathology images, etc. The platform analyses data on site in the hospital, selects only the most valuable small fraction, detects noise in the data and redundancy, ensures compliance with regulations and enables close collaboration with doctors. “We help to access high‑quality data without taking patient information out of the hospital and enable AI for healthcare to be more accessible and commercially viable at scale,” says Anna. As a result, the process becomes noticeably faster, costs are lower, and the models become more accurate and lighter, reducing operational cost in the marketization phase. 

“Right now, there is a race going on in healthcare – who will be the first to create safe and precise artificial intelligence solutions for diagnostics, surgery and other medical fields. To achieve this, you need smart data. A lot of smart, informative data. But in medicine, data is particularly sensitive – it is about patients’ health and privacy”, explains Anna. 

As medical imaging volumes grow and clinician shortages deepen, AI is expected to address the issue, but many models still fail in real-world settings. FiveBrane enables more robust and accessible medical AI by allowing Medical AI solutions to learn from hospital data without moving it, using an on-premises “agent” that extracts only anonymized, reusable insights. This privacy-first approach helps AI systems generalize better and scale safely across healthcare environments. Overall, the goal is to reduce the bias and increase the robustness of AI, making it cost-effective.“Not to analyse a million images just because it is possible, but to smartly choose the small portion that contains the most information,” Anna explains. “We are looking for the data that truly increases the total amount of knowledge.” 

This approach helps to avoid noise, prevents models from becoming unnecessarily complex and protects their quality. It also means lower energy consumption and a smaller CO₂ footprint, because there is no need to train huge, overfed models just because the data is available. As a result, artificial intelligence becomes not only smarter, but also more responsible. 

The company has already collaborated with SYNLAB in Italy on a research study of prostate cancer Gleason grading in histopathology. The data analytics technology agnostic. It is also used in drone video analysis, surveillance systems, warehouses, agriculture and other fields where what matters is not “more data”, but “smarter data”. 

Analysing Data Latvia Wins

Today, FiveBrane is a six‑person international team working in the USA and Germany and Armenia. This means a lot of travel and work across multiple time zones. Yet increasingly often, their eyes are turning north – to Latvia, which in the future could become the main European office. 

One of the reasons, thinks Anna, is cultural proximity. Living in Armenia and sharing a similar historical experience with Latvia makes it easier to sense how people think, how they make decisions and how they talk about the future. This creates a feeling of familiarity already from the very first conversations. 

The second reason is geography. Anna and her team see Latvia as a convenient, well‑connected point in Central and Northern Europe, from which it is easy to travel to other markets. Direct flights, the time it takes to get from one place to another, and the overall logic of the city all matter. In this regard, Riga seems very convenient to her, and the planned direct flights only strengthen this choice. 

The third factor is the regulatory and business environment. Medtech and data processing involve strict European rules, and Anna highly values the fact that serious discussions are already taking place in Latvia about using secondary health data for innovation. She mentions her participation in EIT and healthcare events where, at the state level, people discuss how health data could be used safely and responsibly by companies. For her, this is a clear sign that the country is thinking in the same direction as the technology. 

Her first experience in Riga has also been significant. In 2024, Anna took part in TechChill event and admits that the event left a very positive impression. She met startup representatives and investors, and got to know an ecosystem that is open, curious and ready to listen to new ideas. She describes Riga Startup House as a place where it is pleasant to work not only because of the space itself, but also because of the community – the people and their willingness to share.

Behind every decision in favour of a new market stand not only emotions, but also very practical questions: visas, legal formalities, accounting, the language of documents, cultural nuances in everyday life. In this context, Anna repeatedly highlights the importance of the Investment and Development Agency of Latvia (LIAA) and the Startin.LV “Digital Explorers” program. 

She talks about the help received during the startup visa process, about support in setting up the company, arranging its legal structure and accounting, as well as about practical advice that helps you feel safer in an environment where you do not yet speak the local language. Particularly important has been the possibility to receive clear explanations in English, instead of relying solely on automatic translations, whose nuances do not always match legal reality. 

Anna also highly values the work of LIAA delegations and representatives abroad. For startups entering a new market for the first time, it is crucial to have someone who helps them understand the local ecosystem, culture and rules of the game – where to start, whom to approach, what the first steps should be. In her experience, this chain works well in Latvia and reduces uncertainty for founders entering a new market. 

It is precisely this support that, as she says, accelerated the decision in favour of Latvia and allowed her to focus on what really matters – business development instead of fighting bureaucracy. 

The Fifth Dimension 

The name FiveBrane is no accident. The founding team are all physicists. Anna and Tigran Gevorgyanand (CPO) have PhD in quantum physics, Aram Movsisyan (CSO, chief scientific officer) - in high energy physics, and there is a clear scientific logic in her choice. The fifth dimension is a term from string theory – an additional dimension that allows us to see reality from another, deeper perspective. With artificial intelligence, as she sees it, humanity is reaching a point where it can investigate the next dimension – to find new connections that previously went unnoticed and use them to make better decisions. 

In this sense, Latvia becomes not just a location in the FiveBrane story, but a place where the next phase of the company’s growth can take shape — at the intersection of science, regulation and trust.