Aviary’s new CEO is Tobias Peggs, formerly a Walmart acqui-hire

The startup cycle is a great big wheel: You build, you exit, and eventually, you go back to building again. Entrepreneur Tobias Peggs has just taken on CEO duties at Aviary, the developer’s toolkit for photo features.

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Previously, Peggs headed up OneRiot, a startup that got snapped up by Walmart and rolled into its skunkworks digital arm, Walmart Labs. (He’s got a great essay about that experience, for those who would be acquired.) He recently left that particular mothership, hinting that he’d soon be getting back into the startup space.

On his personal blog, Peggs writes that he’s been communicating with Aviary’s founders for about the past year. “We’ve talked for days about the business potential, especially in the context of a mobile photo space that already seems huge but is really only just getting started.”

Aviary specializes in photo-editing tools. They make their own tools for cropping, adjusting, and filtering photos, and developers can access those tools and plug them into their own apps. Think of the service as a Twilio for photo features: It takes something potentially complicated and makes it easy and fast in an industry where speed is key.

Plus, end users love-love-love filters. Filters can be a make-it-or-break it for a simple photo app, and Aviary’s filter set is good enough to get devs started. In fact, Twitter just partnered with Aviary to bring those same filters into Twitter’s photo product — a huge vote of confidence for the suddenly influential startup.

(We’re getting in touch with Peggs to see if he was responsible for that deal; given the timing of the CEO announcement, it’s not unlikely.)

“One of the hardest decisions startup founders can ever make is to bring in an outside CEO,” siad Peggs.

“As we move forward, it has become clear to me that the company’s accelerating growth is now bringing us into territory that is best handled by someone with a very specific set of skills and experiences tailored to match our B2B strategy,” writes Aviary co-founder Avi Muchnick today on the company blog. “Tobias has deep experience managing accelerated growth in B2B startups, which makes him the perfect leader for Aviary as it really takes off.”