We consider the photo-excitation of charm and bottom pentaquarks with the holographic assignments $[frac 12frac 12^-]_{S=0,1}$ and $[frac 12frac 32^-]_{S=1}$, in the photo-production of heavy vector mesons such as charmonia and bottomonia near threshold. We use a Witten diagram to combine the s-channel photo-excitation of holographic pentaquarks with a massive t-channel graviton or tensor glueball exchange, to extract the scattering amplitude for heavy meson photo-production in the threshold region. The pentaquark signal is too weak to be detected at current electron facilities.