THE VISUAL STORYTELLER

A serial entrepreneur, investor and scholar Hovhannes Avoyan is the founder and CEO of PicsArt which is the world’s largest creative platform and social editing app with 150M+ monthly creative content creators and more than 1B downloads to date. Prior to PicsArt, he founded five startups, all of which had successful acquisitions by global companies like Lycos, Bertelsmann, GFI, TeamViewer, and HelpSystems. He has also been a senior lecturer of computer science at the American University of Armenia and a visiting lecturer at San Francisco State University. The US-based company has been always focused on the Indian market and has been catering to its socially active millennials. The app brand which has a huge following all across the world is further looking to grow in the Indian market and has various ambitious plans ahead. Entrepreneur spoke to Hovhannes Avoyan, Founder & CEO, PicsArt on creating the Picture Perfect Unicorn.

- Punita Sabharwal

Q Tell us about your creative side. I liked art and I was enjoying art but I never became an artist. I was trying to get to art school when I was young. I like and appreciate creative expression. I am trying to be a user on Picsart. I have an account and a following there. I’m experimenting with stuff that I can create. For me, I believe creativity is like a muscle. We need to train it. I feel everybody is creative. We just need to train it.

What led to the start of Picsart?

It’s a personal story, you know when I saw my daughter shocked because of her experience of sharing her work on social networks and getting negative comments from the users. So as a father and entrepreneur I thought of what I can do for her and for people like her to not only be creative but also bring a positive environment. My daughter is now a professional artist and an illustrator. She’s also a part of Picsart.

How big is the global presence of PicsArt?

We passed 1 billion installs of our product and our monthly active users. We can talk to about a hundred and fifty million monthly active users. We are the largest in our category of photo and video editing apps.

Could you share about your presence in the Indian market?

We are not sharing the numbers as of now but the presence in the Indian market is really large and also during COVID we saw a big boost in the user installs and downloads. We are globally amongst the 20 most downloaded app. We have been at 14, 15 16, and yes it was including IOS and Android and India is one of the key contributors.