Professional-grade software tailor-made for your small business — bespoke websites, tools and automations that used to need a team of engineers, now delivered at a price you can afford.

Ari Sagherian — AI engineer, founder of Synthos. Michigan, USA.
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My Story

The path I planned

I grew up in Michigan in a family of immigrants who worked 7 days a week in our family jewelry store. Leading by example, they instilled in me the drive to pursue my education, study hard and build a better life. At 17, I was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye condition expected to leave me blind by 40 or 50. With what seemed like decades of sight ahead, I studied neuroscience at the University of Michigan on a pre-med track, graduated, and was accepted to medical school. The plan was working.

The path that changed

Then one appointment changed everything. My condition had progressed far faster than predicted — at 21, I was legally blind. Becoming a doctor was no longer possible. I turned down my acceptance and applied the deepest lesson biology ever taught me: survivors adapt.

I looked for the overlap between what I could still do well, what fascinated me, and what could support a family. That led to AI — from neuroscience to neural networks. I earned a master's in data science, then spent six years as an AI engineer at General Motors, on their autonomous-vehicle program — writing production code for one of the largest companies in the world (see my LinkedIn).

What I learned building for myself

When modern AI arrived, I tested what one engineer could really do with it. The answer became Synthos Research — a full investment-research platform that reads thousands of hours of expert content, runs data pipelines and custom models, and publishes automatically. Work that once took a team of analysts and engineers, designed, built, and operated by one person.

Meanwhile, my wife was building her own small business — a pediatric speech-therapy clinic. I built her website, her search presence, and her client-inquiry flow, and watched what it did for a real local practice. That's when the two halves of my life clicked together.

Why Synthos Consulting exists

The AI shift is the biggest advantage transfer in a generation, and right now it flows almost entirely to companies big enough to employ engineers. The dental office, the clinic, the accounting firm, the family shop — the businesses run by people like the ones I come from — risk being left behind not because the technology is out of reach, but because nobody builds it for them.

That's the work now: personalized tools — websites, automations, newsletters, custom models, complete AI workflows — built by hand for small businesses, at a price a small business can pay.

And one more thing, because it shapes everything I make: I'm legally blind, so I experience the web the hard way. Every site I build is accessible by default — fast, high-contrast, readable by anyone, on any device. It's not a compliance checkbox for me; it's how I browse.