Web Summit Rio: Picsart announces new GenAI product aimed at solo entrepreneurs

Originally published April 18, 2024

Picsart co-founder and chief product officer Mikayel Vardanyan has unveiled the company’s newest offering, a generative AI product aimed at solo entrepreneurs.

Making the announcement on Web Summit Rio’s Centre Stage, Mikayel said the new tool will “help you, literally in one minute, to accomplish the stuff which you previously have been spending one week on”.

Mikayel went on to explain use cases for the tool, saying, “if you sell something on any marketplace, or if you try to promote your materials on any social networks, the tool will help you to take your object and generate, immediately, different backgrounds for your object, by understanding the context”.

Mikayel said using the new product would take users “literally one-to-two minutes,” and demonstrated it for the audience, with a short video showcasing the tool itself.

The product launch comes just a few week’s after Picsart announced the company’s milestone of one billion images created by its image generator tool, at Web Summit Doha, earlier this year.

Mikayel stressed the company’s ongoing commitment to freemium access, targeting younger users in particular: “We have initially started with a completely free product. So we have not been monetizing it for the first seven years at all.

“When we launched our subscription back in 2018, we tried to make it accessible to broader audiences. But at the same time we try to keep free stuff, because most of our audience was and is gen Z, and we of course know that not everyone is ready to pay and not everyone needs to pay right now, and up until now we still have a large set of tools available for free. That’s good for our users – not so good for us.

“But we still try to keep the free version as advanced as possible in order to help our gen Zs to be more creative. But at the same time we introduce additional tiers with subscription, which include much more advanced tools. Those are mostly targeted towards ‘solopreneurs’, and toward the users who are using our product for their business needs and are ready to pay – because we help them to be more efficient and we help them to accomplish much more things.

“But on the other hand we are going to keep the free version for our broader audience and for our consumers.”

Mikayel’s comments were made as part of a fireside conversation on how AI is creating a design revolution. The co-founder was speaking at Web Summit Rio, where more than 34,000 people have gathered to discuss the most pressing questions around technology, and to make the meaningful connections that will shape the future.

The sold-out event is hosting a record number of women-founded startups (45 percent) among 34,397 attendees from 102 countries. This record-breaking attendance marks an almost 60-percent increase on the number who attended the first Web Summit Rio in 2023. The floor space at this year’s event has increased approximately 25 percent on last year, but the event was still sold out ahead of the opening day.

Web Summit Rio is the largest international tech event in Brazil. This year’s event has brought together 1,066 startups, 45 percent of which are women-founded. This is the highest ever proportion of women-founded startups at a Web Summit event, and the largest gathering of women founders at an event in South America. These startups are joined by 499 investors; 175 partners, including IBM, Huawei, SAP and Salesforce; 518 speakers from companies including BYD, IBM, Grindr and Nvidia; and 844 members of the media from all over the world.

About Web Summit:
Web Summit runs the world’s largest technology events, connecting people and ideas that change the world. Half a million people have attended Web Summit events – Web Summit in Europe, Web Summit Rio in South America, Collision in North America, Web Summit Qatar in the Middle East, and RISE in Asia – since the company’s beginnings as a 150-person conference in Dublin in 2009.

In February, Web Summit held its hugely successful inaugural event in the Middle East. Web Summit Qatar welcomed more than 15,000 attendees and was supported by 100-plus partners, including the Qatar Investment Authority, Snap, Deloitte, TikTok, Huawei, Microsoft, Shell, Palo Alto Networks, EY, Builder.ai and Qatar Airways. Web Summit Qatar showcased the work of more than 1,000 startups from around the world, and helped introduce them to a network of more than 300 investors in Doha.

Web Summit’s mission is to enable the meaningful connections that change the world. Web Summit also undertakes a range of initiatives to support diversity, equality and inclusion across the tech worlds, including Impact, women in tech, Amplify, our scholarship programme, and our community partnerships.

Useful links
Web Summit Rio website: https://rio.websummit.com/
Web Summit Rio media kit: https://rio.websummit.com/media/media-kit/
Web Summit Rio images: https://flickr.com/photos/websummitrio/
About Web Summit: about.websummit.com