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Portrait of Souren Khetcho

About

Born in Aleppo. Building at the intersection of security, crypto, and AI.

Story

I was born Armenian in Aleppo, Syria, and grew up through the civil war. That experience shaped my perspective on resilience, independence, and the role technology can play in giving people control over their lives.

When I was 9, I started creating Counter-Strike skins and breaking games, then developed an interest in physics and competed in the national olympiad. By my teens I was focused on hacking, cryptography, computer science, and decentralized systems.

Today I'm the founder of Avo, a VC-backed marketplace where users can invest instantly with zero barriers across crypto trading agents, indexes, and managed funds. In parallel, I built Agent Grid, an infinite-canvas workspace for orchestrating multiple AI agents, terminals, and browsers side by side, along with research and tooling around LLM memory architectures and agentic UIs.

My previous ventures include OpenAuto ($800K ARR) and WhaleDM (acquired). I've been active in Bitcoin, Monero, and cypherpunk communities since 2014, and continue building at the intersection of technology and finance.

Purpose

As a refugee in Lebanon, I spent my teenage years learning cybersecurity and penetration testing. What drew me in most was cryptography: the mechanics of encryption, privacy, and trustless systems.

That led me to Bitcoin. The ability to move value without permission, across borders, and outside traditional banking was more than a technical breakthrough. It was personal.

I had seen how financial systems can be weaponized: banks enforcing capital controls, currencies collapsing, governments tracking and restricting activity. Crypto offered a path to sovereignty and freedom.

I've always been drawn to problems of adoption and usability. With OpenAuto, the goal was to make auto repair more accessible, affordable, and trustworthy. With WhaleDM, it was about simplifying digital marketing for business owners.

With Avo, I'm applying those lessons to build a marketplace for crypto investing that is secure, decentralized, and practical. At its core, Avo's promise is measured by a simple test:

Simplicity
Can someone start using Avo and deposit funds quickly and easily?
Accessibility
Are we making Avo available to everyone, across chains, funding methods, and different types of portfolios or agents?
Intelligence
Is Avo truly the smartest way to invest in crypto? Have users stopped speculating and started investing?

If we can answer each of these questions with yes, we're delivering on Avo's promise.

Technical background

My technical foundation began in cybersecurity and cryptography. As a teenager, I taught myself penetration testing, ethical hacking, and system exploitation. That early work gave me a deep understanding of encryption, anonymity, and decentralized systems, and how they behave under real-world pressure.

By 2014, I was active in Bitcoin, Monero, and cypherpunk communities, experimenting with mining, privacy-preserving protocols, and peer-to-peer financial systems. These experiences shaped how I think about blockchain, from its cryptographic primitives to its practical applications in global finance.

Blockchain & trading infrastructure

At Avo, I architected a multi-chain trading system that spans Discord, Telegram, Solana, and Ethereum. This includes:

  • Wallet orchestration systems with encrypted key storage and pooled execution.
  • Copy-trade infrastructure that replicates whale and agent trades in real time across user wallets.
  • A Jupiter-based DEX aggregator, and an aggregator-of-aggregators that minimizes gas and slippage through pre-trade simulation.
  • A Solana transaction parser and a Geyser gRPC stream transformer for high-throughput event processing and on-chain liquidity pricing.
  • Structured signature-based security models for zero-click copy-trading that preserve UX simplicity and cryptographic integrity.

Systems architecture

I've engineered distributed backends combining Supabase (Postgres + Functions), ClickHouse for analytics, etcd and Redis for rapid key-value access, and NATS JetStream for real-time event streaming. These systems power wallet tracking, swap execution, trading agent performance, and live analytics pipelines at scale.

My infrastructure experience spans Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, Railway, and Vercel. I've deployed systems optimized for high throughput, cost efficiency, and seamless user experience across web and mobile.

Machine learning & AI

At Vocally, I led the development of proprietary voice AI and NLP models trained on over 1.5M real-world phone transcripts. I built supervised learning pipelines for sentiment analysis, intent detection, and diarization, optimized for noisy telephony environments, including real-time transcription, keyword spotting, and batch inference APIs built with Python and TensorFlow.

AI agents & LLM tooling

I build at the application and infrastructure layer of agentic systems. With Agent Grid, I designed an infinite-canvas workspace that orchestrates multiple Claude Code instances, terminals, browsers, and notes inside a single environment, with role-based workers, MCP integrations, and cross-agent messaging.

I also research persistent context: TAG Memory is a topic-scoped vector memory architecture I built and wrote up to address context pollution in long-running LLM conversations, paired with an open-source MVP. Earlier work includes agentic-ui, an experiment in LLM-controlled surface architectures where the agent composes layout and components, and betternotes, a focused take on AI-native note-taking.

Product engineering

Across ventures, I've owned full-stack development using TypeScript, Node.js, Next.js, React Native, and Go. I've integrated payments (Stripe), authentication (WalletConnect, Dynamic, Privy, and signature-based), and analytics (Mixpanel, PostHog) into consumer apps that reach thousands of users. My approach blends systems design with user experience, making advanced tech intuitive and usable.

In short, my background spans security, AI, blockchain, and large-scale system design. Every product I've built connects those disciplines to create software that is secure, scalable, and designed for real-world adoption.

Passion projects

Agent Grid
An infinite-canvas workspace for managing multiple AI agents, terminals, and browsers in a single environment.
TAG Memory
Topic-scoped vector memory architecture for persistent LLM context, with an open-source MVP.
agentic-ui
Experimental LLM-controlled surface architecture where the agent composes components, layout, and data.
betternotes
Better sticky notes than anything out there.
MeshForest
A mesh-network fire detection system using Raspberry Pi and LoRaWAN for early forest fire detection.
HyperTrader
A trading agent on Hyperliquid that trades on its own.
Paperhead
An autonomous trading agent on Solana that merges multiple data sources and concludes its own strategy.
SockPoker
A poker environment where sock-puppet agents compete against each other.
Ropsten Troll
A troll bot on Ethereum that trolls the network.
Solinko
Plinko on Solana.
Dice-Clash
A Solana dice game for betting on the outcome of a roll.
Xamir
Beginner-friendly in-browser pentesting tools. Kali in the browser.

Papers

  • Topological Adaptive Graphs (TAG): A Topic-Scoped Memory Architecture for Persistent Context in Large Language Models

    Souren Khetcho · 2026 · CC BY 4.0

    A memory architecture for large language models that organizes conversational context into topic-scoped vector spaces with a lightweight metadata routing layer. TAG partitions memory by semantic coherence and routes queries through a two-tier retrieval mechanism—coarse-grained topic classification via continuously updated summary documents, followed by fine-grained semantic search within the selected vector space—using a relevancy scoring system inspired by web search ranking to manage hot/cold storage tiers and address context pollution in long-running conversational AI systems.

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  • MicroOracle

    Souren Khetcho · 2025 · CC BY 4.0

    A novel LLM-based Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus mechanism for decentralized prediction markets.

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  • Layer 2 on Hyperliquid

    Souren Khetcho · 2025 · CC BY 4.0

    An exploration of Layer 2 scaling solutions implemented on top of Hyperliquid. A cohesive analysis of opportunities and limitations.

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