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About

Creative Tools for Curious Minds

Founded in Helsinki in 2008 as a fully web-based online photo and image editor to serve as an alternative for the 90% of users who only utilize 10% of Photoshop’s tools and features, Sumopaint was conceived by our founder Lauri Koutaniemi.

This is a core value everyone at Sumo shares, so our mission is simple: we want to ensure that creative potential is unleashed, rather than lost to the daily grind of modern life: rigid schooling, centuries-old education systems which don’t meet the needs of contemporary students and the responsibilities and burdens of adult life.

Sumopaint fulfilled this primal need for unleashing our creativity in an increasingly digital world that so many don’t even realize they’re lacking.

This is why we’ve grown organically from our inception, with little marketing or sales efforts prior to 2020. In 2016 Sumopaint surpassed 30 million unique users over its lifespan, and our premium subscription services have been available for one tenth the cost of our competitor’s suite.

We’re continuing to foster digital creativity and offer creatives — and creative professionals — a cost effective, streamlined alternative to expensive, inefficient and bulky creative suites with steep learning curves.

We believe that using creative tools should only require Internet access, so our tools boost your imagination.

Not everyone is visually inclined, so in addition to Sumopaint, we built Sumotunes, Sumo3D, Sumocode, Sumophoto, Sumoaudio, Sumovideo and Sumopixel. Each app in our suite is gamified so they're easy to learn and even easier to teach, because we believe everyone should have faith in their creativity. This way, it can’t ever become lost potential.

Our Results

In the 16 years since its conception, Sumopaint has grown by word of mouth with minimal marketing until now. This has given us the unique opportunity to expand the original app into a comprehensive suite of tools that cultivate unique expression in our users and make learning digital creative skills accessible and fun, no matter if you’re 5 or 105. Even so, the success of our efforts astonishes us:

40M+

users on our platforms

20+

years of experience in Saas

500M+

saved images

1000+

schools using our educational apps

Who We Are