The photo processing application Prisma, posted in the AppStore only on June 11, became the leader in the number of downloads in 10 countries - Russia, Belarus, Estonia, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Armenia and Ukraine. This is evidenced by data from the AppAnnie application analytics system. The application's rating in the USA and Germany turned out to be high - 4.5 points out of 5 possible (it is the same in Russia).

Prisma allows you to process photographs, turning them into stylizations of paintings by famous artists. The application operates on the basis of a complex mathematical model using neural network algorithms.

The founder of the Prisma project, Alexey Moiseenkov, until yesterday worked as a manager of the Mail.ru Group’s subsidiary project – My.com, and since Tuesday he quit to focus on his own project, he himself told Vedomosti. According to him, Prisma already has 650,000 downloads in Russia alone.

Moiseenkov calls Prisma his personal project, to which Mail.ru Group has nothing to do. Mail.ru Group, however, made it clear that it is interested in the former employee’s project. “Just a week after the launch of the Prisma app, created by our employee Alexey Moiseenkov, it took over social networks and app charts,” says a post on the My.com Facebook page. “We believe in the great future of neural networks and that the success of Prisma will give My.com the prospect of offering cool new products.”

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In March 2016, the world's largest social network Facebook bought the Belarusian Masquerade, the developer of the popular MSQRD application in the AppStore. It allows you to apply one or another filter to a photo before publishing it online - for example, in the form of a famous face (during the Oscar ceremony, many users who wanted to support actor Leonardo DiCaprio applied a filter with his image to their photos )....
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In March 2016, the world's largest social network Facebook bought the Belarusian Masquerade, the developer of the popular MSQRD application in the AppStore. It allows you to apply one or another filter to a photo before publishing it online - for example, in the form of a famous face (during the Oscar ceremony, many users who wanted to support actor Leonardo DiCaprio applied a filter with his image to their photos ). At the time of the deal with Facebook, the application was downloaded, according to the developers, more than 12 million times.

An acquaintance of Moiseenkov knows that Mail.ru Group can become an investor in the project. The decision is being discussed, confirms an interlocutor close to the company. Two more people close to both sides say that Mail.ru Group considers itself entitled to a share, since Moiseenkov was its employee. In such disputes, first of all, the circumstances of the creation of the product are taken into account, explains Goltsblat BLP partner Elena Trusova: did the employer give the employee an official task to create the work, did he pay remuneration, did he evaluate and accept the finished result. A Mail.ru Group representative declined to comment.

Moiseenkov himself claims that Prisma does not need money yet. He does not say whether the project has investors other than himself. One of his acquaintances calls him partners with people who invested in MSQRD (see sidebar). This is Nikolai Davydov and his Gagarin Capital fund, says another friend. Davydov himself does not comment on this, but his acquaintance says that Gagarin Capital has not yet invested in Prisma, and if it does, it will receive up to 5% of the project. Several Vedomosti interlocutors familiar with its developer call Yuri Gursky one of the project’s consultants - Vice President of Mail.ru Group for new products. Moiseenkov confirms this, Gursky does not comment.

To work in Europe and the USA, Prisma uses servers from Servers.com, says Moiseenkov and confirms CEO and co-owner of Servers.com Alexey Gubarev. Every day the project requires doubling capacity (compared to the first day), says Gubarev, so that 20 days after launch Prisma will use 20 times more capacity than at launch. Neither the founders of Prisma nor the partners expected such explosive growth, he admits.

Russian apps have been hits, but not often. In 2011, the game Cut the Rope, created by Efim and Semyon Voinov’s Zeptolab, made it to the top of the AppStore rating. In the first 10 days, AppStore visitors downloaded it 1 million times. 650,000 installations in Russia for the first nine days of operation is a very solid figure, says Sergey Kravtsov, owner of OMMG Technology and the 4talk messenger.

Investors have recently been loving projects related to image processing. Snapchat, a service that allows you to exchange multimedia messages and apply various photo effects, raised more than $1.8 billion in its latest funding round. Its investors include Sequoia Capital, Spark Capital, Meritech Capital Partners and Dragoneer Investment Group. According to the results of the round, information about which appeared on the TechCrunch blog, Snapchat is valued at about $18 billion.

Corrected version. The original published version can be viewed in the Vedomosti archive (smart version)

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