We can barely contain our excitement today as we announce that Aviary has been acquired by Adobe. Together we will build and connect the next generation of creative applications.
While this news undoubtedly points to a fantastic future, it is worthwhile quickly recalling the recent past to help explain why this acquisition is such a tremendous next step for all concerned.
Aviary was founded to bring creative freedom to the world. In everything we’ve ever done, Aviary seeks to inspire people to express themselves freely and creatively. Many people are familiar with our self-titled photo apps — with intuitive editing experiences and an ever-expanding collection of creative content (custom photo filters, frames, stickers and more). In fact, we’ve had more than 100 million downloads to date! But the platform that's powering these apps behind the scenes has always been the largest part of our efforts. It also forms the backbone of a free SDK that we offer to third-party developers. This allows us to extend our technology and creative tools not only to Aviary app users, but to users of thousands of other creative mobile apps that today are used by millions of people to edit billions of images each month. It also gets at the core of Aviary’s philosophy: that mobile creativity happens best across a diverse ecosystem of apps that users are free to choose, not in silos.
Aviary's HQ in New York City is very close to the offices of Behance, the creative community that joined Adobe 18 months ago – and that is now a cornerstone of Adobe's Creative Cloud offering. Over the last year, we've gotten to know Behance co-founder Scott Belsky, who now serves as Adobe's VP of Products and Community. Scott and Govind Balakrishnan, Adobe's VP of Product Development for the Creative Cloud Ecosystem, have been driving an initiative to extend Adobe technology to third-party creative applications — an effort that manifested itself in June when Adobe launched its Creative SDK in private beta. As we all talked (and talked, and talked…), it became obvious that we shared a strong vision for mobile creativity. It became even more obvious that we should join forces, accelerate combined efforts and better serve even more app developers and even more people wanting to be creative on mobile. Today, we start that journey together.
Already, our teams are brainstorming on things that we can accomplish together. We will continue to support and enhance Aviary's SDK as part of Adobe's broader Creative SDK offering. While ensuring no interruption to Aviary's developer community, or their apps’ users, we plan to add additional components and services for developers to incorporate – such as the ability to save creations to Creative Cloud in Adobe file formats, access Photoshop technology, and connect creativity across devices using the Creative SDK.
On behalf of everyone at Aviary, I’d like to thank our developer partners and the millions of people who use Aviary-powered apps. Your support has gotten us this far. We’re now going to deliver so much more for you – as part of Adobe.
For more information, read the Adobe press release here.
Tobias Peggs, Aviary’s CEO