Hovha'nnes Avoyan (Hovhannes Avoyan, hy, Հովհաննես Ավոյան; born March 23, 1965), is a serial entrepreneur, investor and scholar. He is the co-founder and CEO of

Picsart Picsart is a Miami, Florida-based technology company that develops the Picsart suite of online photo and video editing applications, with a social creative community. The platform allows users to take and edit pictures and videos, draw with laye ...

, a suite of online photo and video editing applications. He also served as President of the Union of Information Technology Enterprises of Armenia (UITE) from its inception in 2000 until 2015. Hovhannes Avoyan is a member of the American University of Armenia Corporation Board of Trustees.

Early life and education

Hovhannes Avoyan was born in 1965 in

Yerevan Yerevan ( , , hy, Երևան , sometimes spelled Erevan) is the capital and largest city of Armenia and one of the world's List of oldest continuously inhabited cities, oldest continuously inhabited cities. Situated along the Hrazdan River, Y ...

Armenia Armenia (), , group=pron officially the Republic of Armenia,, is a landlocked country in the Armenian Highlands of Western Asia.The UNbr>classification of world regions places Armenia in Western Asia; the CIA World Factbook , , and ''Ox ...

. He graduated from the

State Engineering University of Armenia The National Polytechnic University of Armenia () is a technical university located in Yerevan, Armenia. Established as the Karl Marx Institute of Polytechnic in 1933, it provides educational and research programs in various fields of technology ...

with a B.S. degree in

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

in 1987 and received an Masters in Political Science and International Affairs (M PSIA) from the

American University of Armenia The American University of Armenia (AUA) ( hy, Հայաստանի ամերիկյան համալսարան, ՀԱՀ; ''Hayastani amerikyan hamalsaran'', ''HAH'') is a private, independent university in Yerevan, Armenia that is accredited by the Wes ...

in 1995. He is also a 2005 graduate of Harvard Business School's Bertelsmann Senior Executive's program.

Career

In 1996, Avoyan founded CEDIT, a software development services company, which was acquired by mobile communications software developer Brience in 2000. In 2005, Avoyan founded and served as CEO of Sourcio, a software development and system integration service provider acquired by software developer HelpSystems in 2016. In 2007, Avoyan founded and served as General Manager of Monitis Inc., which was acquired by TeamViewer/GFI Software) in 2011. In 2011, with his friend Artavazd Mehrabyan, Avoayan founded Picsart, a social photo and video editing platform, and became the company's CEO. Picsart's software reportedly has more than 150 million monthly active users, and has been downloaded 1 billion times as of September 2020.

Accolades

In 2016, Avoyan received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the

. In 2019, The Armenian Trade Network named Avoyan as the recipient of its Global Achievement Award.

Philanthropy

Avoyan supports AI development in Armenia by establishing schools and best practices in the country to help its data scientists compete globally.

Artificial intelligence

Hovhannes is an author and speaker on

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

and advocates the establishment of

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

and

data science Data science is an interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge and insights from noisy, structured and unstructured data, and apply knowledge from data across a br ...

schools in

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Avoyan, Hovhannes 1965 births Living people Computer programmers Harvard Business School Businesspeople from Yerevan Armenian inventors 21st-century inventors