Hovha'nnes Avoyan (Hovhannes Avoyan, ; born March 23, 1965), is an

Armenian-American Armenian Americans () are citizens or residents of the United States who have total or partial Armenian ancestry. They form the second largest community of the Armenian diaspora after Armenians in Russia. The first major wave of Armenian immig ...

serial entrepreneur, investor and scholar. He is the co-founder and CEO of Picsart, 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 ( , , ; ; sometimes spelled Erevan) is the capital and largest city of Armenia, as well as one of the world's List of oldest continuously inhabited cities, oldest continuously inhabited cities. Situated along the Hrazdan River, Yerev ...

Armenia Armenia, officially the Republic of Armenia, is a landlocked country in the Armenian Highlands of West Asia. It is a part of the Caucasus region and is bordered by Turkey to the west, Georgia (country), Georgia to the north and Azerbaijan to ...

. 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, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

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

American University of Armenia The American University of Armenia (AUA) (, ՀԱՀ; ''Hayastani amerikyan hamalsaran'', ''HAH'') is a private, independent university in Yerevan, Armenia that is accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges Senior College and Un ...

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 the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

and advocates the establishment of

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

and

data science Data science is an interdisciplinary academic field that uses statistics, scientific computing, scientific methods, processing, scientific visualization, algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge from potentially noisy, stru ...

schools in

References

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