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App management startup AppFollow raises $5M Series A round led by Nauta Capital
AppFollow, an app management startup, has raised a $5 million Series A round led by Barcelona’s Nauta Capital, alongside existing investors Vendep Capital and RTP Global participating.
The Helsinki-headquartered company says it benefitted during the pandemic and even in April 2020 as the desire for automation and apps exploded. It says it now has 70,000 clients on its platform globally, including McDonald’s, Disney, Expedia, PicsArt, Flo, Jam City and Discord.
CEO Anatoly Sharifulin said in a statement: “AppFollow helps teams understand sentiment, both for your users and competitor’s, figure out how your potential customers search for apps and use this knowledge to make your app more visible and, of course, follow on your KPIs like downloads and revenues to be sure that all is under control.”
Eugene Kruglov of Nauta Capital said: “We are extremely delighted to partner with Nauta Capital on this round. And having both of current investors and as well some of our customers to participate in the round proves that we are on the right direction to become the market standard for effective app management.”
The company, which employs 65 people across nine countries, all working remotely, will use the investment to strengthen its presence in the U.S. and Europe, hire VP-level executives in sales and marketing, and diversify their platform.
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Watch an unfiltered interview of PicsArt founder at Disrupt Berlin
Smartphones have become a creative playground thanks to cameras and innovative apps, such as PicsArt. With PicsArt, anybody can add filters and stickers and tweak photos and videos in many different ways. It has been a massive hit with 130 million monthly active users. And that’s why I’m excited to announce that PicsArt founder and CEO Hovhannes Avoyan is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.
PicsArt started with a simple app that lets you edit photos before sharing them. There are many companies in this space, including VSCO, Snapseed and Prisma. But PicsArt has managed to become a cultural phenomenon in many countries, including China.
If you’re thinking about editing a photo or video in one way or another, chances are you can do it in PicsArt. In addition to traditional editing tools (cropping, rotating, curves, etc.), you can add filters, auto-beautify your face, change your hair color, add stickers and text, cut out your face and use masks just like in Photoshop… I’m not going to list everything you can do because it’s a long list.
The result is an app packed with features that lets you express yourself, create visual storytelling and improve your social media skills. If you’re an Instagram user, chances are you’ve seen more than one photo that has been edited using PicsArt.
While the app is free with ads, users can also subscribe to a premium subscription to unlock additional features. And PicsArt is not just about editing, as you can also use the app as its own social network.
PicsArt is based in the U.S. and has raised $45 million over the years. But the company is also betting big on Armenia, with a big engineering team over there.
And it’s a natural fit, as Hovhannes Avoyan is originally from Armenia. In addition to PicsArt, he has founded many successful startups in the past — he sold them to Lycos, Bertelsmann, GFI, TeamViewer and HelpSystems. Many entrepreneurs would have a hard time founding just one of these companies, so I can’t wait to hear how Avoyan manages to work on so many different products and turn those products into successes.
Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to this discussion and many others. The conference will take place on December 11-12.
In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to compete for the highly coveted Battlefield Cup.
Hovhannes Avoyan is a serial entrepreneur, investor and scholar. He is the founder and CEO of PicsArt, the No. 1 photo and video editing app and community with more than 130 million monthly active users. PicsArt is backed by Sequoia Capital, Insight Venture Partners, DCM and Siguler Guff. The company employs more than 350 people and is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices across the globe in Yerevan, Armenia; Los Angeles; Beijing; and an AI lab in Moscow.
Avoyan brings more than 25 years of experience in computer programming and global business management. Prior to PicsArt, Avoyan founded five other startups, all of which had successful acquisitions by global companies including Lycos, Bertelsmann, GFI, TeamViewer, and HelpSystems.
He is a graduate of Harvard Business School’s Bertelsmann Senior Executive’s program. He received his B.S. and M.S. from the State Engineering University of Armenia and his M.A. in Political Science and International Affairs from the American University of Armenia. He’s also a frequent speaker at business conferences on topics ranging from business strategy to international team building and Al.
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VSCO sues PicsArt over photo filters that were allegedly reverse engineered
Photo-editing app-maker VSCO has filed a lawsuit against competitor PicsArt.
The suit focuses on 19 PicsArt filters that were supposedly “reverse engineered from VSCO’s filters,” with VSCO alleging it has become a legal issue involving false advertising and violations of the app’s terms of service.
“VSCO has invested significant time and resources in developing its presets [a.k.a. filters], which represent valuable intellectual property of VSCO,” the company writes.
In a statement, PicsArt denied the suit’s claims:
VSCO is not a direct competitor, but they clearly feel threatened by PicsArt. VSCO’s claims are meritless. It’s disappointing that they have made these false claims against us. PicsArt will vigorously defend itself against these baseless claims and all options are under consideration.
Specifically, VSCO says that at least 17 PicsArt employees created VSCO accounts — probably not an uncommon competitive practice, but the suit claims they used those accounts to reverse engineer the filters, thus violating the terms in which users “agree not to sell, license, rent, modify, distribute, copy, reproduce, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, publish, adapt, edit or create derivative works from any VSCO Content.”
In addition, the suit accuses PicsArt of engaging in false advertising by describing the filters in its PicsArt Gold subscription as “exclusive” and “only for [PicsArt] Gold users.”
Why is VSCO so sure that the PicsArt filters were based on its own? The suit says:
VSCO’s color scientists have determined that at least nineteen presets published by PicsArt are effectively identical to VSCO presets that are only available through a VSCO account. Specifically, VSCO determined that those PicsArt filters have a Mean Color Difference (“MCD”) of less than two CIEDE2000 units (in some cases, far less than two units) compared to their VSCO counterparts. An MCD of less than two CIEDE2000 units between filters is imperceptible to the human eye and cannot have been achieved by coincidence or visual or manual approximation. On information and belief, PicsArt could have only achieved this degree of similarity between its filters and those of VSCO by using its employees’ VSCO user accounts to access the VSCO app and reverse engineer VSCO’s presets.
The suit goes on to claim that VSCO’s lawyers sent PicsArt a letter in February demanding that the company identify and remove any filters that were reverse engineered or copied from VSCO. The letter also demanded “an accounting of all profits and revenues generated from such filters” and that PicsArt identify any employees who had created VSCO accounts.
In VSCO’s telling, PicsArt then responded that it was “in the process of replacing certain underperforming filters and modifying others,” including the 19 filters in question, but it only removed 17 — and supposedly two of the new filters “were similarly reverse engineered from VSCO’s proprietary presets.” The suit also says PicsArt has failed to provide the information that VSCO demanded.
VSCO does not appear to be suing for a specific monetary value, but the suit asks for “disgorgement of any proceeds obtained from PicsArt’s use of VSCO filters,” as well as injunctive relief, compensatory damages and “the costs of corrective advertising.”
You can read the full complaint below.
VSCO Complaint by on Scribd
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Former Viki CEO Tammy Nam joins PicsArt as its first COO
PicsArt, the company behind the photo-editing app of the same name, has hired Tammy Nam as its first chief operating officer.
Nam was most recently the CEO of Viki, the Rakuten-acquired video streaming service, and before that served as a marketing executive at Viki, Scribd and Slide.
PicsArt said Nam will report to founder and CEO Hovhannes Avoyan, and that she will oversee all aspects of the business except for product and engineering.
“PicsArt has grown organically so far, but our next big opportunity is in directing this growth through the right market development, community engagement and revenue channels,” Avoyan said in the announcement. “In addition to her proven operational experience in both consumer advertising and subscription-based businesses, Tammy adds deep bench strength in market, brand and community development — areas that will be critical for us moving forward.”
The company announced last year that it’s reaching 100 million monthly active users. Nam told me she was particularly impressed that it achieved that growth without significant marketing spend.
“I understand what it takes to grow quickly, but also thoughtfully,” she said. “Because of my background, the CEO and the board felt like I would be a great match to [help PicsArt] reach the next 200 million, the next 500 million users.”
Asked what thoughtful growth looks like for PicsArt, Nam said it means not just growing at any cost, but also considering things like revenue and the different communities using the app. She said she’s trying to examine the company’s structure to ensure it can “maximize efficiencies towards these big goals.”
“It will continue to grow organically, but the branding, the user development will definitely evolve,” she added. “There’s a sea of companies that play in our space … How do you stand out? And how do you stay relevant?”
Nam also said that she’ll be looking at PicsArt’s opportunities for international growth. Not that the company has been neglecting the world beyond the United States — China is its fastest-growing market and already one of its top countries for revenue. (The company says it recently became profitable following the launch of its PicsArt Gold subscription.)
Nam suggested that PicsArt can move into new markets without competing with the dominant social media platforms, because it’s “agnostic” in terms of where users publish their edited photos.
“It’s completely lowered the barrier,” she said. “It used to be you had to know Photoshop. Now it’s so easy to create professional-looking photos, images and soon animations, videos, etc. Everyone is a creator.”
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PicsArt drizzles Prisma-style magic on your pics and videos
PicsArt today launched a brand new pair of apps for iOS, adding Prisma-like effects for photographs and videos to the visually stimulating toolbox that lives inside your phone. The company also launches a Remix Me feature, turning photo adjustments into a social experiment not entirely unlike what we saw with the now-defunct Dubble app. Read More
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Former Facebook And Instagram Marketer Eric Edge Joins Photo Startup PicsArt
PicsArt is announcing that it has hired Eric Edge as its vice president of marketing. Edge spent the last four-plus years at Facebook (where he led the company’s marketing efforts in Europe, the Middle East and Africa), then at Facebook-owned Instagram (where he worked on brand strategy). He told me he hadn’t been planning to leave, but when he learned about PicsArt, he thought it… Read More
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PicsArt, a photo-sharing service that’s building a community around creatively editing pictures, has raised $15 million in a venture round led by Insight Ventures with Sequoia Capital also contributing.