Embrace
While attending Stanford, after a summer spent working with the United Nations in South Sudan, Hovaghimian and fellow Stanford classmates Jane Chen, Linus Liang, Naganand Murty and Rahul Panicker founded Embrace, a non-profit that designed and patented an affordable infant incubator for the developing world.[2][5] Embrace grew to a company based in 14 countries as of 2014.[2] Embrace received an INDEX People's Choice Award, and in 2010 was selected as an Innovative Technology for Public Health by the World Health Organization.[6]
NBC Universal
In 2007, Hovaghimian went to work at NBCUniversal in the strategic planning group.[2] By 2009, he was a senior vice president, working on the company's digital and international growth strategy.[2] Hovaghimian left NBC later that year to focus full-time on another company he founded, Viki, an international online video service.[2]
Viki
International online video service Viki also started as another class project while Hovaghimian was at Stanford. He met co-founders Changseong Ho, a fellow Stanford student, and his wife, Jiwon Moon, who was studying education technology at Harvard. Viki gets its name from combining the words video and wiki.[7] It was originally created as a language-learning tool, helping its users learn languages by creating subtitles on online videos.[2]
Hovaghimian served as the company's CEO.[8]
In 2010, Hovaghimian incorporated Viki and moved to Singapore, where he set up the company's headquarters and hired its first engineers.[9] He chose Singapore for the company's headquarters in part due to its proximity to key Asian markets.[9]
Viki eventually morphed into an international online video site, licensing content from countries across the globe, with subtitles crowd sourced from an international community of viewers and volunteer translators.
Rakuten
In December 2013, following its acquisition of Viki, Rakuten announced that Hovaghimian would become its senior executive officer of global content.[2] He oversees Rakuten's entire video content business worldwide, including Viki.com and Wuaki.tv, which airs paid premium content in Europe.[12] He was also named an observer to Rakuten's board of directors, and became the company's first Entrepreneur in Residence.[12][1]
Hoodline
In 2016, Hovaghimian founded Ripple News, a city-focused news platform.[13] Later that year, Ripple acquired Hoodline, another local news site, and took the name Hoodline as the new combined company. In 2019, the Hoodline was acquired by neighborhood social media site Nextdoor. In 2020, publisher Impress3 Media acquired the Hoodline website and brand name from Nextdoor.[14]
Film producing
Hovaghimian was an executive co-producer, along with Adam McKay, Will Ferrell and Meileen Choo, of Oh Lucy!, a 2017 film starring Josh Hartnett and Shinobu Terajima, and based on a 2014 short film of the same name.[15]
