The list of Ukraine’s tech industry playears sold in multimillion-dollar acquisitions is short.
The first one happened in 2012, when Google-owned Motorola Mobility, an American telecommunications equipment corporation, acquired Ukrainian facial recognition technology company Viewdle for about $45 million according to Bloomberg.
Now Looksery, an Odesa-developed real time face-changing and tracking technology, has reportedly trumped the Viewdle deal and become the second — and by far the largest — multimillion-dollar tech acquisition in Ukraine’s history so far.
On Sept. 15, the global online tech resource TechCrunch reported that the developers of Snapchat, a mobile application for video and photo messaging, confirmed the acquisition of Looksery.
According to sources of the Ukrainian online tech journal, AIN.UA, the amount is close to $150 million, which, if true, makes the acquisition the biggest in the Ukrainian tech industry’s history.
According to TechCrunch, Snapchat declined to comment on the acquisition price or whether AIN.UA’s number was accurate.
Looksery was founded by Victor Shaburov, an entrepreneur from Odesa, in 2013. It launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter that same year and over-reached its goal, collecting around $50,000.
As a mobile app, Looksery was available for download free of charge in Apple’s App Store and Google’s Google Play. Since the app’s launch less than a year ago, in October 2014, it has reached around 10 million downloads on all mobile platforms, due to Julie Krasnienko, marketing and business development head at Looksery.
Now Looksery app has disappeared from Apple’s and Google’s mobile app stores. The Snapchat app, though, has introduced a new feature, called Lenses, that modifies one’s face, making the eyes bigger, face leaner, adding graphic symbols, like emojis, and turning one’s appearance in a ghost or making skin wrinkled.
The way Snapchat’s Lenses feature works is almost identical to how Looksery app used to change one’s appearance.
The news spurred a huge buzz among the representatives of the Ukrainian tech industry, seeing it a big chance for other Ukrainian projects to get a spotlight on the global scene in the light of the successful acquisition of Looksery.
Kyiv Post staff writer Bozhena Sheremeta can be reached at [email protected]. The Kyiv Post’s IT coverage is sponsored by AVentures Capital, Ciklum , FISON and SoftServe.
