Snap spent $ 8 million to buy a 20-year-old Ukrainian startup

Snap bought the rights to all startup technologies of Teleport Future Technologies . The sales contract was signed in February 2018, but it took effect only in November.

The Teleport application, which became famous thanks to its hair color change function, has been loved by millions of users. In 2017, the app set a record in the Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian App Store, receiving over a million downloads within the first 24 hours after the premiere. Teleport has occupied first place in app stores for over a week. Already in February, the American company Snap decided to buy a startup, the transaction amount was $ 8 million.

After signing the contract, part of the startup team moved to Los Angeles and London, where the headquarters of Snap Inc. are located. However, one of the company's owners, Ukrainian Vdadyslav Urazov, as a result of this agreement became a 20-year-old millionaire and intends to set up a fund that will specialize in investments in young AI-startups.

Hair coloring function is not the most important accomplishment of a startup.

The teleport has become famous thanks to the function that accurately determines the hair in the picture and realistically paints it in various colors. The application gained a special popularity after several well-known bloggers published collages from Instagram.

The hair coloring function is not the most important effect of the work of the Teleport Future Technologies team. The fundamental challenge the authors of the project worked on was to learn image segmentation technologies, i.e. to identify objects in pictures and video. Now Teleport allows you not only to change the background in the pictures, but also during the video call or in the already saved video.

Sometimes we are not in places where it would fit. Using our technology, we can visually change the location. This can be useful for those who are broadcasting live. - said the creator of the project Vladyslav Urazov in an interview with Liga.net .

How does image segmentation technology work?

To create image segmentation technology, the startup team collected 30,000. photos of people presented in different situations. Teleport employees manually processed each photo, identifying people, hair, skin and background on it. Thanks to the database consisting of 30 thousand developed images divided into different categories, the neural network has learned to remember and determine where the picture is human, hair, and skin. Vladyslav Urazov claims that his team has worked for a long time, but thanks to this he is the creator of the best technology in the world to identify people against the background.

In the case of video, the work area was much wider. The neural network works with images, and one second of the video contains 25 images.

Today, Teleport Future Technologies offers image segmentation, video segmentation, online video segmentation, and hair and skin color change. Maybe soon we will be able to try all these functions on Snapchat.

The creator of the project is a 20-year-old Ukrainian who comes from Odessa, who alone ... is not a developer.

Teleport project was created in 2017, when its originator, Vladyslav Urazov was 19 years old. While still studying, he dealt with the arbitration of network traffic (redirecting users from one side to the other) and earned thousands of dollars, and then created his social network Spersy (very similar to Instagrama, only for Russian users). After finishing school, the Ukrainian moved to Moscow and invented the Teleport project.

Vladyslav Urazov is not a developer, but he managed to gather a team of specialists who implemented his idea. Startup sold 30 employees from Ukraine, England, France and Russia before selling.

I can confirm that the best of our programmers have moved to Los Angeles and London and are now working at Snap using the Teleport technology. I now see three large international companies that are willing to employ specialists from the post-Soviet space. These are Samsung, PicsArt and of course Snap.

I think that a great future awaits these companies in the field of AI. As for my plans for the future, in the near future we plan to establish our own fund with partners, which will invest in startups from the AI ​​industry. I am sure that we will manage to find unique projects that will surely appear on the market in the coming years. - the creator of the Teleport project shared his vision.

Let us remind you that this is the second startup from Ukraine, who bought Snap. In 2015, the company acquired Looksery for 150 million. dollars.

Looksery is a software for mobile devices that allows you to modify your own face in real time to improve your appearance in photos or during video calls. Using the application, you can lose weight, gain weight, even out skin color and eliminate its defects, change everything - from the eye color to the shape of the skull, put on the face the image of a hero from a cartoon or from a horror movie.



Snap spent $ 8 million to buy a 20-year-old Ukrainian startup

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