Peter Arvai


The native Hungarian form of this personal name is Árvai Péter. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.
Peter Arvai is a Hungarian/Swedish businessman. He is CEO and co-founder of Prezi, a cloud-based presentation software company. As an entrepreneur, he founded omvard.se in Sweden, and co-founded Prezi along with other two co-founders Adam Somlai-Fischer, a designer and Peter "HP" Halacsy, a computer scientist and university professor; and officially launched it in 2009. Peter Arvai was one of the developers of Patented Web feed message browsing along with Joacim Boivie and Joakim Hilj.

Education and early career

He was born in Karlskoga, Sweden, his parents are Hungarians. He has been living in Tokyo, Stockholm, Singapore and San Francisco, he lives in Budapest. Peter Arvai attended Stockholm University in 2001 and graduated with a master's degree in business administration in 2006. During his time at Stockholm University, Arvai participated in the 12 month Vulcanus in Japan programme, established by the EU and the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. During this time he studied Japanese and completed a training program at Fuji Xerox in Japan. As part of his business program, Arvai studied economics in Singapore for an exchange semester. Arvai was one of the first batch of students to attend the newly introduced Master in Media Technology and Engineering program at the Royal Institute of Technology. After graduating Arvai co-founded the program's alumni group.
Arvai launched omvard.se, a company that helps patients compare treatment outcomes between hospitals. Omvard.se won best website of Sweden 2009. He was also vice president for product portfolio at the Swedish mobile communications company Mobispine, where he worked with Joacim Boivie and Joakim Hilj to develop first mobile newsreader to follow TED Talks from mobile devices.
When his mother became ill, he and three friends designed a Website, that compared Swedish clinics and hospitals. Internetworld, a Swedish magazine, awarded them with "best Website of the year in Sweden" in 2009.

Prezi TED Investment

In 2009, Arvai co-founded Prezi, a presentation software, with Ádám Somlai-Fischer and Péter Halácsy. He approached TED Conference given the companies’ common vision of promoting the open exchange of ideas and he had pitched the investment idea to in the conference. TED Conference, Accel Partners and Sunstone Capital were Prezi's investors that participated in Series A and Series B funding rounds.

Personal life

Arvai speaks English, Swedish, Hungarian and Japanese fluently, is a Bikram Yoga enthusiast and has expressed interest in writing a Swedish-language cookbook on everyday Japanese cuisine. He was the first openly gay CEO in Hungary. He made his coming out in 2015 in a Forbes piece to have a gay role model for young people considering to be entrepreneurs.

Engagement

With his company Prezi, he became the first, who joined in the Budapest Pride Parade in 2010. Together with Google and espell, he founded WeAreOpen, a Nonprofit organization dedicated to openness, justice and change.
Arvai is co-founder and chairman of the organization Bridge Budapest, which publishes about 5 million inspirational stories each year.

Awards

Peter Arvai is author of "Developing the Business Case for a New Mobile Service: An Exercise in Business Model Designing" -VDM Verlag June 25, 2008