Original Content- Business Upside
Picsart as a startup earned the status of a unicorn recently when it garnered a valuation of over a billion. Havhannes Avoyan’s freemium photo editing app PicsArt raised 130 million dollars at a valuation of almost 1.5 billion. It has thus been efficiently rapidly replacing Lightroom and Photoshop for the Gen Z of Instagram.
How Picsart Came into Being:
Avoyan grew up in Soviet Armenia and always harboured the dream of visiting an art school. However, his art dreams came to a crash when his designs and applications were rejected. Momentarily he gave up on his dreams of pursuing art and design and steered away to computers. He found a new passion for designing apps and focused mainly on machine learning and artificial intelligence. For the next thirty years almost, he gradually became one of the leading guys in the Armenian tech field with three brilliantly successful software startups.
Avoyan always remained a connoisseur of art and his love for it never faded, although his dream did. He egged his children to do the same. It was not until his eleven-year-old daughter Zara got internet bullied for a drawing she posted that Avoyan’s art school dream kicked in again. Zara was heartbroken from all the negative criticism she had received and Avoyan as a father wanted to shield her. So he did it in the only way he knew- he created an app that would enhance and mold a few of the features of a picture in order to make it better. The app that was borne out of parental concern then moved on to become one of the most downloaded apps in the upcoming ten years. It has therefore gone from a mere photo enhancing app to a full-blown editing app along with video editing features and the means to create digital art, even for amateurs.
Comments