PicsArt Mobile Creative Image Community Raises $15M Led By Insight Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital

PicsArt Mobile Creative Image Community Scores $15 Million in New Funding

PicsArt mobile creative image community today announced $15M in new funding from Insight Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital. The new round follows a previous investment of $10M from Sequoia earlier this year. The new funding will enable the company to expand globally and develop new tools for users.

PicsArt mobile creative image community is for amateur and professional photographers, designers, artists and anyone who wants to use PicsArt’s extensive image creation and editing tools to beautify their world. PicsArt’s further enabled community collaboration with its latest feature update. Now #freetoedit images from PicsArt mobile creative image community can be shared on Facebook, inviting a new community to use PicsArt’s desktop-grade tools to edit their images.

Users can also share their creative process with others through automatically generated timelapse videos. Hit a button when you start working on an image and when you are done, share a video showcasing your technique so other users can learn from you. These are just the latest tools empowering PicsArt’s community of more than 65 million monthly active users that co-creates more than 250 million images per month.

“We want to continuously provide artists with the means to connect and collaborate,” said PicsArt CEO and founder, Hovhannes Avoyan. “With this round of funding, we can continue to do so with app updates that boost collaboration settings, such as video generation, increased sharing and the latest photo-enhancing tricks.”

“PicsArt’s rapid growth is a true testament to its unique creative platform,” said Jeff Horing, managing director at Insight Venture Partners. “We are pleased to partner with the PicsArt team as they continue to set themselves apart by solidifying a community of collaboration.”

Anyone with a smartphone can download the PicsArt Mobile Creative Image Community app from the App Store, Google Play, Amazon or Windows. To learn more, go to www.PicsArt.com.

About PicsArt
PicsArt Mobile Creative Image Community is the largest mobile community of creatives and creative images. The company’s U.S. office is based in San Francisco, California with a focus on enabling anyone to be creative, share, socialize, discover, learn and be inspired. The app has been installed over 230 million times and continues to expand and improve, so anyone can unleash their creativity and discover their inner artist.

About Insight Venture Partners
Insight Venture Partners is a global private equity and venture capital firm founded in 1995. They also invested heavily in Bellevue-based SmartSheet. They have raised more than $10 billion and invested in more than 200+ growth-stage software, internet, and data-services companies. Our Investment Team meets with thousands of companies each year, selecting a handful to invest in, supporting them with market insights and exposure to potential acquisitions and acquirers. Our Insight Onsite team provides hands-on resources and collaborative expertise to help companies scale.

About Sequoia Capital
The Sequoia team helps a small number of daring founders build legendary companies. We spur them to push the boundaries of what’s possible. In partnering with Sequoia, companies benefit from our unmatched community and the lessons we’ve learned over 40 years working with Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, John Morgridge, Jerry Yang, Elon Musk, Larry Page, Jan Koum, Brian Chesky, Drew Houston, Adi Tatarko and Jack Dorsey, among many others. In aggregate, Sequoia-backed companies account for more than 20% of NASDAQ’s total value. We’re proud that their success also fuels great causes: since 2000 alone we have returned more than $10 billion to non-profits like the Ford Foundation, Mayo Clinic and MIT.

Free Download for BBJ Subscribers: "Understanding the Myths of Market Trends and Patterns"

For a limited time, BellevueBusinessJournal.com subscribers can now download the free ebook from Forex Trends called Understanding the Myths of Market Trends and Patterns.

Click on the link to download your copy of this extremely valuable information on how to actually make money in Forex trading.

For those of you unfamiliar with Forex, or uncertain what Forex is, here is the entry for Forex at Wikipedia:

Foreign exchange market

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Forex" redirects here. For the football club, see FC Forex Brașov. For the U.S. FBI sting operation, see Dominic Brooklier § Bompensiero murder.

Foreign exchange
Exchange rates
Currency band Exchange rate Exchange-rate regime Exchange-rate flexibility Dollarization Fixed exchange rate Floating exchange rate Linked exchange rate Managed float regime
Markets
Foreign exchange market Futures exchange Retail foreign exchange
Assets
Currency Currency future Currency forward Non-deliverable forward Foreign exchange swap Currency swap Foreign-exchange option
Historical agreements
Bretton Woods Conference Smithsonian Agreement Plaza Accord Louvre Accord
See also
Bureau de change Hard currency Currency pair
v t e

The foreign exchange market (forex, FX, or currency market) is a global decentralized market for the trading of currencies. In terms of volume of trading, it is by far the largest market in the world.^[1] The main participants in this market are the larger international banks. Financial centres around the world function as anchors of trading between a wide range of multiple types of buyers and sellers around the clock, with the exception of weekends. The foreign exchange market determines the relative values of different currencies.^[2]

The foreign exchange market works through financial institutions, and it operates on several levels. Behind the scenes banks turn to a smaller number of financial firms known as “dealers,” who are actively involved in large quantities of foreign exchange trading. Most foreign exchange dealers are banks, so this behind-the-scenes market is sometimes called the “interbank market”, although a few insurance companies and other kinds of financial firms are involved. Trades between foreign exchange dealers can be very large, involving hundreds of millions of dollars. Because of the sovereignty issue when involving two currencies, forex has little (if any) supervisory entity regulating its actions.

The foreign exchange market assists international trade and investments by enabling currency conversion. For example, it permits a business in the United States to import goods from the European Union member states, especially Eurozone members, and pay Euros, even though its income is in United States dollars. It also supports direct speculation and evaluation relative to the value of currencies, and the carry trade, speculation based on the interest rate differential between two currencies.^[3]

In a typical foreign exchange transaction, a party purchases some quantity of one currency by paying with some quantity of another currency. The modern foreign exchange market began forming during the 1970s after three decades of government restrictions on foreign exchange transactions (the Bretton Woods system of monetary management established the rules for commercial and financial relations among the world's major industrial states after World War II), when countries gradually switched to floating exchange rates from the previous exchange rate regime, which remained fixed as per the Bretton Woods system.

The foreign exchange market is unique because of the following characteristics:

• its huge trading volume representing the largest asset class in the world leading to high liquidity;


• its geographical dispersion;


• its continuous operation: 24 hours a day except weekends, i.e., trading from 22:00 GMT on Sunday (Sydney) until 22:00 GMT Friday (New York);


• the variety of factors that affect exchange rates;


• the low margins of relative profit compared with other markets of fixed income; and


• the use of leverage to enhance profit and loss margins and with respect to account size.

As such, it has been referred to as the market closest to the ideal of perfect competition, notwithstanding currency intervention by central banks.

A New Day Real Estate: Bellevue Homes Report December 29, 2014

This information was first posted at ANewDayRealEstate.com, but shared here on the Bellevue Business Journal news site, as our readers have said that they are very interested in the current state of real estate in Bellevue and on the Eastside.

 
This is the Bellevue Homes Report for December 29, 2014 by Joe Kennedy of A New Day Real Estate and the Bellevue Real Estate Investors .



As of today there are 109 single family residences in Bellevue listed for sale on the Northwest Multiple Listing Service.

The homes currently listed for sale in Bellevue range in price from $419,900 for a 1,490 square foot house in Lake Hills to $32.8 million for a 11,520 square foot estate on Meydenbauer Bay / Lake Washington.

In all of Bellevue, there are currently only 11 houses listed for sale at less than $500,000. There are only 57 homes in Bellevue listed for sale at less than one million dollars and there are 52 houses in Bellevue that are listed for sale at over $1 million.

If you are interested in buying, selling, investing or are just curious as to where your currently property fits in, please feel free to call me at 425-429.8590 or email Joe(at)ANewDayRealEstate.com.

If you live, work and/or play in Bellevue, it's important that you know about Renewal Food Bank in Bellevue. They do great work helping to feed over 250 families in Bellevue each week. Renewal Food Bank is located at the Highland Covenant Church at 15022 Bel-Red Road, Bellevue, WA 98007 and online at http://RenewalFoodBank.com.

A New Day Real Estate and the Bellevue Real Estate Investors networking group will be working to help support Renewal Food Bank during 2015. Please contact me if you would like to help.