companies

PicsArt

Consumer photo and video editing app with AI background removal, generation, retouching, and upscaling tools used by hundreds of millions.

PicsArt was founded in November 2011 by Hovhannes Avoyan along with engineers Artavazd Mehrabyan and Mikayel Vardanyan, growing out of Yerevan, Armenia into one of the most widely installed photo-editing apps in the world. The company is now headquartered in Miami with a large engineering base still in Armenia, and raised $130 million in a 2021 Series C led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 at a valuation over $1 billion, on top of roughly $195 million in prior venture funding from Sequoia and Insight Partners. What started as a mobile collage and sticker app has layered on more than two dozen AI-powered tools over the past few years: background removal and replacement, object removal, a text-to-image generator, AI-assisted retouching, and upscaling, alongside its long-standing manual editing toolkit. PicsArt says its AI image generator alone has produced more than 700 million images. In 2024 the company partnered with Getty Images to train a generative model on licensed content for commercial use inside its apps, a response to the licensing disputes that have dogged other image generators. The platform remains free-to-use with a paid Gold/Plus/Pro subscription tier layered on top for watermark removal and higher AI usage limits.

Founded

2011

Headquarters

Miami, United States

Sector

consumer