Pakistani brothers launch Smartphone app with $175,000 backing from Kima Ventures

The team is working on releasing their Android and iPhone appsfor Artsly soon.

With an increasing number of smartphone apps making their way into the market, brother duo – Muhammad Huzaifa and Muhammad Jehanzaib – recently launched Artsly, a video-based social learning platform,  backed by Kima Ventures, a platform providing funds to support and finance innovative companies, to the tune of $175,000, techinasia.com reported on Wednesday.

Aiming at a global audience, Artsly lets you discover learn and share premium art lessons in make-up, music, photography, food, painting and crafts from various instructors in English.

“An artist would upload his paid or free videos lessons on Artsly in any art related category and his lessons would be available to Artsly users,” Huzaifa, Artsly’s CEO, writes on his blog.

“With Artsly we want to build a community of artists and learners who deeply care about learning new artistic skills. And of course key to its success would be high quality video lessons,” he continued.

This is not their first initiative. Earlier, the sibling entrepreneurs had introduced iKnowl, a mobile app striving to make education accessible and entertaining. However, after 6 months of iKnowl’s release, Huzaifa realised that it’s going to fail and discarded the product, only to start working on his next venture, Artsly.

“Our initial product idea was released in early January and with little or no marketing in just four weeks we were able to secure 1,400 beta signups and 1,600 Facebook Likes. This doesn’t guarantee that Artsly would be successful but it does tell that artists and learners are interested in such a platform,” he claims in his blog.

The CEO of Artsly said that unlike their competitors Lynda, Team Treehouse, Udemy etc, who target male audiences, their product reaches out to women because “they are most active on YouTube and other content channels”.

Just five months after the launch of the product, the duo published their iPad app. The team is working on releasing their Android and iPhone apps soon.