Age: 29
Education: Kyiv Mohyla Academy
Profession: Cofounder of Ukrainian startup Reface
Did you know? In August 2020, face swap video app Reface — co-founded by Mogylnyi and his friends — topped the U. S. App Store, ahead of even TikTok and Netflix.
Ukrainian tech entrepreneur Roman Mogylnyi and his friends developed a technology that blurs the distinction between fiction and reality. Called Reface, it allows users to try on faces of celebrities in videos and make them look like their own.
The app has gone viral worldwide: Over 60 million people have used Reface, according to Mogylnyi. Among them, there are stars like Snoop Dogg, Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears and Elon Musk.
For Mogylnyi, it is a great milestone — he has always wanted to have a successful business and thinks that the Reface technology has already outperformed its competitors.
“We entered this market early,” he said. It was long before other companies even dared to bet on the technology, he added.
Mogylnyi began working with machine learning — the process when a computer processes large amounts of data to learn new algorithms on its own — when he was only 19. In 2011, Mogylnyi, Petriv and Boiko co-founded tech startup Neocortext that was later to become Reface.
The startup immediately became Ukraine’s story of success. Forbes, Mashable, The Sun, and The Verge all wrote about the technology it has created.
According to Mogylnyi, their business took off because Reface has the quickest and most accurate tool on the market. Its algorithm adjusts faces to different lights, colors, and facial expressions within a few seconds, so users can place their images on videos of celebrities very fast.
Because the technology is so advanced, it is also used in the entertainment, film, gaming, and advertising industries, Mogylnyi said. A film studio, for example, can spend less money on production if it uses Reface, while brands can attract more customers if they offer a personalized ad.
However, the same tech used to entertain can deceive by creating deepfakes — videos that are hard to tell from the real thing and that may be used to create fake news.
Mogylnyi understands the risks but said that Reface doesn’t want to deceive people. Its final goal is to make users more creative and allow them to imagine things that are impossible in the real life.
To avoid ambiguity, the company places watermarks on images and videos to demonstrate that the videos aren’t real. The company is also working on a not-for-profit web tool to detect deepfakes, Mogylnyi said.
Reface has already become popular and even did better on the U. S. App Store than Netflix, TikTok and Hulu — tech companies that invest millions of dollars in advertising themselves. But Ukrainians have even more ideas up their sleeve.
According to Mogylnyi, they showed only 10% of what the technology is capable of. For now though, the Ukrainians do not reveal the full potential of the tool to avoid misuse.
“We want our technology to be used responsibly,” Mogylnyi said.
