The story
PicMonkey was founded by former Picnik employees Brian Terry, Justin Huff, Charlie Whiton, and Lisa Conquergood, with financial support from former Picnik CEO Jonathan Sposato. Picnik was a popular online photo editor that had been acquired by Google in 2010, but was shut down in January 2012. Terry, Huff, Sposato and others saw this as an opportunity to create a new company, PicMonkey, which was founded in April 2012 with the stated aim of creating a "fast and lightweight" photo editing experience.
PicMonkey was recognized as a Top 100 Website in 2013 by PC Magazine, listed as hosting one of the Best April Fools' Pranks of 2014 by TIME Magazine, and recognized as one of the most affordable online services for startups.
By February 2014, PicMonkey had become profitable, and had grown to over 13 million unique monthly users. In July 2015, the company received a $41 million investment from the growth equity firm Spectrum Equity.
On September 2, 2015, Frits Habermann joined PicMonkey as Chief Technology Officer. Habermann had formerly worked as vice president of core technologies at Adobe, and as the CTO of PopCap Games. In 2017, Habermann was appointed as the new PicMonkey CEO. Former CEO Jonathan Sposato continued on the PicMonkey board of directors as the chairman.
In 2018, PicMonkey did away with the Adobe Flash Player plug-in for web browsers. In 2019, the service launched a collaborative image editing feature. In 2020, PicMonkey began supporting video editing.
On September 7, 2021, PicMonkey was acquired by Shutterstock in a $110M cash deal. This has resulted in the stock photo options, which was originally provided by PicMonkey, now being shifted and provided by Shuttershock.
From Wikipedia’s article on PicMonkey, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4