Project Obelisk discloses $8 million round with $4 million convertible conversion

Why it matters

Project Obelisk has paired research-grade engineering with operators who helped scale vertical software businesses. The filing verifies $8 million of securities sold, although $4 million came from earlier convertibles, leaving the product, investors and valuation undisclosed.

Project Obelisk, Inc., a Glendale, California software venture led by CEO Matthew Roell, disclosed a fully sold $7,999,997 equity offering involving five investors in a Form D filed on July 22nd.

The filing gives Project Obelisk a substantial financing total before Roell and the rest of Project Obelisk's leadership have publicly described a product. It also contains a qualification that changes how the headline number should be read: $4 million of the offering came from the conversion of securities that Project Obelisk had sold previously.

Project Obelisk therefore did not establish that the entire $8 million arrived as new cash in July. The Form D's offering details show $7,999,997 sold and nothing remaining, while stating that the total includes $4 million in converted securities. Up to roughly $4 million could represent new proceeds beyond those earlier convertibles.

The equity sale began on July 13th, nine days before the SEC accepted the filing. Project Obelisk claimed the Rule 506(b) exemption, reported no sales commissions or finder fees and listed no proceeds allocated for payments to the executives, directors and promoters named in the document. Project Obelisk declined to disclose its revenue range.

An operator-heavy leadership group

Roell signed the filing as CEO and is also identified as an executive officer, director and promoter. His public record is limited, although a ServiceTitan Armenia post previously identified him as a senior director of ServiceTitan's product analyst team. Roell was working at the time to establish a new product analyst role inside ServiceTitan, whose software handles core workflows for home and commercial contractors.

That background places product design and operating experience at the center of Project Obelisk. Two other named officers add customer-success leadership and research-heavy engineering.

Armen Derkevorkian is listed alongside Roell as an executive officer, director and promoter. An American University of Armenia biography identifies Derkevorkian as a former Jet Propulsion Laboratory member of technical staff and principal investigator whose research covered machine learning, data-driven modeling and structural health monitoring.

Derkevorkian earned two master's degrees, a graduate certificate in violin performance and a PhD from the University of Southern California, according to the university biography. USC listed his 2014 dissertation as research into data-driven approaches for system identification, condition assessment and health monitoring. He later worked as a project leader at Boston Consulting Group, according to his Armenian Society of Fellows profile.

His aerospace work included co-authoring a 2019 research paper on the modeling and simulation of supersonic parachute inflation during a Mars landing. The paper studied the interaction among supersonic flow, parachute fabric and suspension lines, comparing simulations with data from NASA's Curiosity mission.

Vach Hovsepyan, also named as an executive officer, director and promoter, supplies the go-to-market and scaling side. A City of Glendale technology initiative biography identifies Hovsepyan as a former ServiceTitan senior vice president of customer success who oversaw the post-sale customer journey. Hovsepyan previously worked in banking technology consulting at PwC and earned a master's degree from USC's Marshall School of Business.

Hovsepyan later joined CurbWaste, which sells operating software to waste haulers, as co-founder and chief operating officer. CurbWaste founder Michael Marmo described Hovsepyan's appointment as bringing experience from ServiceTitan and workforce-management software provider Deputy.

Project Obelisk's combination of Roell and Hovsepyan reunites two operators with experience inside ServiceTitan, one of Los Angeles' defining vertical software businesses. Derkevorkian adds a technical record built around applied mathematics, machine learning and physical systems.

A venture investor is already in the boardroom

The fourth person listed is director Tianxiang "TX" Zhuo (@txzhuo), a general partner at Fika Ventures. Zhuo co-founded the Los Angeles seed firm after working at McKinsey and Innovation Endeavors and previously co-founding Karlin Ventures. Fika says his investment areas include vertical SaaS, fintech and cybersecurity.

Zhuo's directorship gives Project Obelisk an experienced seed investor in its governance structure. It does not establish that Fika invested in the offering. The Form D reports five investors without identifying any of them, leaving the lead investor, participating funds, ownership terms and valuation undisclosed.

The $4 million convertible conversion also indicates that Project Obelisk had financing activity before this first federal offering notice. The filing does not say when those securities were issued, who bought them or whether their conversion was tied to a priced equity round.

The product remains the missing piece

Project Obelisk was incorporated in Delaware in 2025 and registered in California on August 13th, 2025. A California registry-derived record describes Project Obelisk's business as "software development and services" and lists Roell as CEO, Hovsepyan as secretary and chief financial officer, and Derkevorkian as another principal. The SEC filing uses the less specific industry classification "Other."

Project Obelisk has not publicly disclosed a website, product, customer base or target market. Assigning Project Obelisk to aerospace, enterprise software or another sector based on the leadership resumes would go beyond the available evidence. Derkevorkian's technical background can support research-intensive software, while Roell and Hovsepyan have spent years building products and customer operations for specialized industries. The filing does not reveal which of those capabilities Project Obelisk intends to use.

That restraint may be deliberate. Project Obelisk has assembled technical, product, customer-success and venture experience before making a public product pitch. The financing gives Roell and his colleagues room to build without attaching Project Obelisk to an early market narrative. The next meaningful disclosure will be the problem they have chosen to solve, because the July filing establishes the capital and the people while leaving the core business almost entirely under wraps.