August 27, 2021 - 14:17 AMT
Picsart is the first startup created in Armenia to become a unicorn

Picsart announced on Thursday, August 26 that it has raised a $130 million round led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2. The new capital infusion pushes the company’s valuation north of the $1 billion mark, making it the first startup created in Armenia to become a unicorn.

Per PitchBook data, the company’s preceding round of capital, in 2019, valued the company at around $600 million.

Picsart COO Tammy Nam told TechCrunch in an interview this week that her company was now past a $100 million run rate, and that it was worth more than a flat $1.0 billion after the SoftBank round.

What is certain, then, is that the company is doing nine figures of revenue that start with one, and that it is worth ten figures that also start with a one.

What makes the Picsart news fun, apart from its constituent large numbers, is that its product is quite cool. The company builds mobile and desktop image and video editing tools for consumers and professionals alike, which means that you have likely seen work created by its tools in the wild. And frankly, because they are something that anyone can use, it’s a startup that feels more tangible than most.

Picsart provides both free and paid services. Its paid products include more images for users to work with — watermark removal and the like. The company also offers a teams-focused plan with multi-seat purchase options, though Nam said that because her team had not yet publicized the option to their user base, it’s too early to tell how the product is faring. It’s effectively in beta, she explained.

More broadly, the company’s monetization efforts are succeeding. We can tell that from Picsart’s revenue growth. Happily, Nam provided a bit more context, saying that the company had millions of subscribers today. She sees more room for growing, explaining that if her company tripled its gross subscriber number, the resulting cohort would still be a “drop in the bucket” when compared to its active user tally. There again, Picscart was somewhat coy with the data. It previously said that it had reached 100 million monthly actives in October of 2017, 130 million in 2019 and around 150 million earlier this year. Picsart would only say that it has more than 150 million today.

Turning to the company’s revenue mix between consumers and business users, Nam stressed that the dividing line between the two is especially blurry among Generation Z, which is a key Picsart user demographic. That makes it difficult to parse the precise revenue mix at the company today. However, Nam told TechCrunch that its business revenue represented around 30% of total revenue in an interview earlier this year, which provides directional guidance for us today.