New generation, new habits, new companies

Ambition is a must-have if you are an entrepreneur. If you don’t have any ambitions you probably won’t survive while paving your own path to successes. However, ambition only works if you have the background, know-how and the will to work hard, otherwise, unsupported ambition leads only to disaster. And I can tell from my own experience that the latter is far more common, by almost 99 percent. That’s why when I hear big claims from anybody, I tend to become very skeptical.

The same happened when Kemal Uğur, the co-founder and CEO of Pixery, told me that they want to become the Adobe of mobiles. But in the end, I believed that he is one of the 1 percent, because he can back his claim with what he has done so far. Before Pixery, he was working with NGCodec as director of algorithms, and before that, he was leading the audiovisual content representation team at Nokia Research Center, where he invented/co-invented many technologies that are included in video-coding standards.

He is an inventor/co-inventor of around 70 patent applications and 50 academic publications in these areas.

As a company they have already been chosen as fourth at Deloitte Fast Fifty with an annual growth rate of 4,600 percent. Pixery really has a shot at becoming the next big story of the Turkish ICT industry.

In his own words, Pixery is a global tech company with two research and development (R&D) offices in Istanbul and Ankara and a satellite office in San Francisco. They are building innovative video-focused apps for next generation mobile creatives.

Pixery has two main products, Impresso, which was chosen as app of the day by Apple, and Funimate, which is used by more than 40 million people around the world. Funimate was selected as “Best New App” by Apple at its launch, selected as “Editor’s Choice” by Google and consistently ranked in Top-10 in its category.

Of course, to be downloaded 40 million times is not only about the team or the technology. There are megatrends backing Pixery’s focus areas. Visuality is very big among teenagers as you all must have witnessed. Because of this Instagram culture, the sales of make-up have increased a month preteen by many folds compared to 10 years ago.

This is also why there are hundreds of different applications competing with Funimate and Impresso. Uğur says that their main difference is the artificial intelligence that learns more about your usage each time you use the app and the amount of original themes that can be found in their applications. Because he says, originality is very important for the new generation. He adds that everybody wants to create posts as if they are professional artists who use Adobe Creative software but lacks the expertise to edit their videos on those. So what they do is to give the people the smart tools that they need in a user-friendly way that does not require any prior education. 

Pixery has successfully found what the new generation wants and how they want it. Let’s see how their story will unfold.