Creative-focused Armenian app PicsArt has hit 100 million monthly active users, TechCrunch reports.
Hovhannes Avoyan, CEO and founder of PicsArt said: “We see 100 million monthly active users as an important milestone toward making everyone creative; we intend to reach a much larger audience in the years ahead.”
To help accelerate growth, PicsArt has now launched an iMessage App for Stickers; community-created ”#freetoedit” Stickers and a new feature called Remix Chat.
Although now based in Silicon Valley, PicsArt emerged from — and has become a star of — Armenia’s nascent startup scene which also includes mobile learning startup SoloLearn.
The story behind the PicsArt’s birth starts with a little girl. One day Avoyan — a serial entrepreneur who founded five previous companies — came across his 10-year-old daughter, who was crying. She’d shared one of her drawings online and trolls had filled the comments section with nasty jibes. She was quickly discouraged to continue sharing. So he decided to create a space for artists, with quality tools, that was also a positive space. In contrast to some other social networks we might mention, trolling was actively discouraged. A place where people could learn, create and share art, experiment, collaborate. The early motto was “Everyone is Creative,” which later changed to “Make Awesome Pictures”.
It now employs over 350 people in the US, Europe, and Asia and sports one of the largest collections of open-source images in the world. Its biggest office is in Armenia, and looks any other super-modern Silicon Valley office.
Over 850 million photos are edited with PicsArt monthly, and many of them are free to use images and stickers. That makes it one of the largest collections of free images and stickers in the world. The company says its users are making over 50M stickers every month.
