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Lensa, an AI photography app developed by Prisma Labs, skyrocketed in popularity in November when it introduced a “Magic Avatar” feature that transforms selfies into images that closely resemble professional digital art. .
Katie Dull/NPR
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Katie Dull/NPR
Lensa, an AI photography app developed by Prisma Labs, skyrocketed in popularity in November when it introduced a “Magic Avatar” feature that transforms selfies into images that closely resemble professional digital art. .
Katie Dull/NPR
Belarusian billionaire living in Cyprus. Dinner with Snap’s CEO. Six-figure patent troll case.
All of this is part of the history of Prisma Labs, an artificial intelligence startup that went unnoticed for years until it introduced “Magic Avatars” in November.
The capabilities of Prisma’s Lensa app have enabled millions of people to turn ordinary selfies into stunning AI-generated animated portraits of fairy princesses and astronauts. And it brought in tens of millions of dollars.
Now Prisma is trying to harness that magic.
Company executives are scrambling to come up with ways to expand the buzz. This includes partnership talks with big companies like Disney and Marvel, he learned from NPR.
At the same time, Prisma grapples with its past.It’s not the first time a little-known startup has taken the internet by storm, but the company trying to remain a formidable player in the app world is plagued by a history of stumbling and a string of failed acquisition talks..
NPR spoke to about half a dozen people with close ties to the company (90 active in Cyprus) to get a clearer picture of the company’s murky history.
The Belarusian tech entrepreneur behind a string of health and wellness apps, including period-tracking service Flo, now commands immense power at Prisma, but he’s kept his company ambitions tight. I was.
Back in 2016, when Prisma last released its AI-powered photography app to reach a global audience, company executives expressed keen interest in the company’s potential during meetings with tech giants. I flew from Beijing to Silicon Valley for
No acquisition deal was signed.
Company insiders cite patent troll lawsuits, corporate cultures at odds with more established tech companies, and, at least in the United States, anti-Russian skepticism as factors in the growing interest.
Prisma hopes this time will be different.
The release of Magic Avatars soared to the top of the App Store charts after being downloaded over 20 million times. For $3.99, users can create 50 photorealistic and fantastical avatars of themselves, as if they were drawn by a professional digital artist.
The concept was simple. The app scrapes billions of publicly available images from the web and processes them using an open-source algorithm known as Stable Diffusion.
So did Apple. Even when Rentha faced her criticism of women’s bodies and disabilities, large amounts of cash flowed in. black skin Debate over whether technology steals artists’ work was also portrayed. The magical possibilities and potential pitfalls of AI were embraced by thousands of people every day.
Max Kreminski, a researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who studies creative applications of AI, said:
An example image generated by Lensa’s Magic Avatars feature, which debuted in November and has been used tens of millions of times.
Prisma Lab’s Lensa App
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Prisma Lab’s Lensa App
An example image generated by Lensa’s Magic Avatars feature, which debuted in November and has been used tens of millions of times.
Prisma Lab’s Lensa App
The economy of the app has paid off greatly.
It only costs the company about 50 cents to process a pack of Magic Avatars, and people are paying at least $3.99 for it, so one insider said, “there’s a big margin.”
Prisma Labs made more than $70 million from the app in November alone, company officials estimate.
According to insiders who estimate that half of Magic Avatars’ revenue is basically electricity, the biggest cost is the enormous computing power required to process the avatars.
The company wouldn’t comment on specific numbers, but said it relies on Amazon Web Services servers to power this feature.
Company executives say user selfies are deleted from the servers after the avatar is created, but the selfies are used as data to train the app’s algorithms.
From Russian big tech to viral AI photo apps
In June 2016, five Russian big techs came together to found Prisma. Alexey Moiseenkov, Oleg Poyaganov, Ilya Frolov, Andrey Usoltsev and Aram Hardy.
As a student at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Frolov was taking classes from Moiseenkov, former product manager of Mail.ru, which owns a Facebook-like social media site. Moiseenkov tried to make inspired by the ideas of his own students. To develop an AI-powered photo app, we teamed up with Poyaganov and Usoltsev, who previously worked at Yandex, Russia’s most popular search engine.
Hardy, another former Mail.ru employee, is now in charge of marketing.
With a small team of only 9 people, They created a hit app that offers easy-to-use editing tools and filters people are their Photos resemble famous works of art.technical publications The Barge called it the best app of 2016, declaring, “Prisma will make you fall in love with photo filters all over again.”
Even if the app works application Buffering time was added to make the process feel more “magical” to users, according to a former top Prisma employee.
A Prisma spokesperson countered this, saying the processing times reflected AI systems operating in real time.
The latest app, Lensa, may take several hours to finish processing the Magic Avatar. Those familiar with the app say it’s not the result of a ruse, but a window into the computational power required to generate the images.process A Prisma spokesperson said, “It requires an incredible amount of computation.
At the height of its success in 2016, the company ran into some problems. An app called “Prizmia for GoPro” developed by a North Carolina man has been sued for trademark infringement after renaming it to “Prizmia”.
A federal judge in Delaware finally ruled in Prisma’s favor more than a year later. A lawsuit was filed, costing the company $600,000 in legal fees and a significant amount of wasted company resources, according to sources at the company involved in the case, who called the owner of Prizmia a patent troll. I took it away.
Kicker? The plaintiff had offered Prisma to settle for her $400,000.
“I thought it was silly at the time,” the source said. “But it ended up being more affordable than our legal defense.”
Tech suitors have still been knocking as the lawsuit unfolded.
many deadlocked acquisition talks
Chinese tech giants Tencent and Bytedance are in talks to acquire Prisma, according to people involved in the negotiations. Facebook and Google were also having discussions. The deal never materialized. Apple also signed a deal with Prisma around this time, and negotiations met the same fate.
Prisma co-founder Hardy told NPR: “So the whole discussion faded.”
Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snap, which makes Snapchat, said: Two sources told NPR that he met with Moiseenkov shortly before the Snap was released in 2017 and expressed interest. But before the offer was extended, talks broke down over visa issues related to Prisma’s small Moscow move of his team to the United States.
It’s not clear why Prisma didn’t come to terms with any of the companies it was interested in, but one of its early investors said the excitement about the app was extraordinary., make The lack of solidity brings even more disappointment.
“This level of interest was highly unusual,” said headlines at the time about Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections, deterring, at least among American tech companies, from buying Moscow startups. A source at the company said they believed it was.
Over the next few years, Prisma attempted to transform into a business-to-business enterprise, but the effort was unsuccessful.
Moiseenkov then left the company, handing the reins of CEO over to Usoltsev.
Last March, Usoltsevf laid off 30% of its staff and told employees they would have to move out of Cyprus or Russia.
A former Prisma employee pointed out that the announcement was made weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, and “potential investors were told they didn’t want to work with Russians.” said.
“They said the acquisition would be more difficult if we stayed in the country,” said the former employee.
The company confirmed the job cuts and a memo to staff to NPR, but said the move was caused by economic sanctions imposed against Russia in the wake of the war in Ukraine.
Belarusian technology investor Largest Prisma investor
Yuri Gurski, a Belarusian investor and former Mail.ru executive, now owns a majority stake in the company.Gursky He runs startup Palta, the makers of a suite of health and wellness apps such as Flo, Simple Fasting, and Zing Fitness.
In 2016 Mail.ru also invested in Prisma Labs. Since 2021, Vladimir Kiriyenko, its CEO, Being a Russian oligarch and subject to sanctions by American and European authorities following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But Mail.ru no longer owns Prisma.
Palta bought shares in Mail.ru and former CEO Moiseenkov, giving it over 50% control. Neither Gurski nor his other Palta representatives responded to requests for comment.
Prisma Labs currently has about 90 employees, most of them based in Cyprus, where Gurski also lives.
The company was founded in Sunnyvale, California, but a person involved in the process said the Sunnyvale location was just a post office box.
Lensa Focuses on Brand Partnerships
According to Prisma insiders, many of the company’s employees are scrambling to keep Magic Avatars’ momentum going so it doesn’t repeat itself.
One investor who has backed the company for years said, “It’s trendy now, but in four months will people be using it? If anything like what happened in 2016, by then everyone will be using it.” You will forget,” he said.
Prisma is eyeing potential collaborations with major brands. It might be tempting to jump at the AI moment.
The company is in talks to partner with Disney and Marvel to allow users to turn their selfies into characters from the two franchises, according to people familiar with the negotiations, but a source said: A deal doesn’t seem imminent.
Kreminski, an AI researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said there are dozens of startups building creative tools on top of the Stable Diffusion technology used by Lensa. and mid-journey — So you need more than a viral avatar feature to stand out.
“It’s a very frothy space. There are so many people trying to tap into this technology right now,” he said. “And I don’t know if the existence of past success means future success.”
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