{"id":14924,"date":"2019-04-30T10:10:01","date_gmt":"2019-04-30T10:10:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/prisma-labs-raises-6m-for-its-ai-powered-approach-to-visual-editing.html"},"modified":"2019-04-30T10:10:01","modified_gmt":"2019-04-30T10:10:01","slug":"prisma-labs-raises-6m-for-its-ai-powered-approach-to-visual-editing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/prisma-labs-raises-6m-for-its-ai-powered-approach-to-visual-editing.html","title":{"rendered":"Prisma Labs raises $6M for its AI-powered approach to visual editing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remember Prisma? <\/a> The Moscow-based team behind the app that sparked a style transfer craze in 2016<\/a> has raised a $6 million Series A, led by early stage artificial intelligence focused VC firm, Haxus.<\/p>\n

While one of Prisma\u2019s original co-founders left the company in the middle of last year<\/a>, taking some team members with him, to work on building a new social app \u2014 the still, as yet, unreleased Capture \u2014 co-founder Andrey Usoltsev stayed on to keep developing Prisma Labs, taking up the CEO role.<\/p>\n

The Series A funding will go towards expanding Prisma\u2019s 21-strong team and scaling the business by spending on marketing to grow uptake of its apps\u2019 premium subscription offers. These include a subscription layer for its eponymous app which gives users access to styles not available in the free version.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re going to grow rapidly. We\u2019re going to double our team this year and set up the impressive marketing budget,\u201d says Usoltsev.<\/p>\n

Late last year the team released a new freemium selfie retouching app, called Lensa<\/a>, hoping to capture a slice of the beauty filter\/photo-editing market. Their twist was to bake in AI smarts that power automatic adjustments \u2014 smoothing skin tone, whitening teeth, brightening eyes and so on, at the touch of the in-app camera button \u2014 as if by technomagic.<\/p>\n

Their pitch for the selfie retoucher is \u2018natural\u2019 looking enhancements. And Prisma claims it\u2019s seeing \u201cvery high\u201d retention rates for Lensa, more akin to a sticky social network than photo-retouching software.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

They argue the app\u2019s face-retouching machine learning algorithms have benefited from the heap of data amassed from Prisma\u2019s multi-millions of selfie-submitting users. And while there\u2019s certainly no shortage of rival apps out there claiming to make selfies look better, Lensa\u2019s AI-powered retouching does offer \u2014 at a glance \u2014 less crude\/more plausible results than plenty of gimmicky \u2018beauty filter\u2019 apps also touting reality-editing wares. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThere is competition [for selfie retouching] and we think that it is good because it shows the size of the market,\u201d says Usoltsev. \u201cIt\u2019s huge. There are millions of people using apps like Facetune<\/a> and what our advantage is is that we have a great technical team, RD team that creates the best technology on the market in some areas\u2026 that trained building Prisma.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re focusing on the quality and the natural look of the results. And some apps on the market didn\u2019t pay as much attention as needed to these two things. We\u2019re going to focus on this. We are not the first in this space but we are going to be the best in this space.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAutomation is the key,\u201d he adds. \u201cWe can now provide users with new kind of product, new kind of photo- and video-editors that automate the routine and requires less effort from the user side to get awesome results.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lensa, <\/a> which launched in December with a subscription offering right off the bat, now has more than 100,000 users, according to Usoltsev \u2014 though it\u2019s not breaking out paying subs yet.<\/p>\n

The early userbase skews female and young \u2014 without, according to Usoltsev, Prisma doing any overt targeting \u2014 the main group being 18-24 year old women, somewhat unsurprisingly for a selfie beautifying app.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe product is not viral, like Prisma, and most of the users are acquired from paid sources like Facebook ads and so on so. We strongly control the amount of users we acquire and now the product is not ready for the real scale,\u201d he continues, noting they\u2019re in the process of tweaking the app to expand the features and improve product market fit.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re also playing with the business model, with the initial subscription offering definitely feeling a bit underwhelming vs the core free AI-powered edits. (You can read our first look at Lensa here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

\u201cRight now we\u2019re very close to start scaling it,\u201d he adds. \u201cWe need a couple of more releases to be ready 100% and then we start scaling.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re going to expand the range of features. We\u2019re going to add a video feature because our primary feature \u2014 retouching \u2014 works in real-time and we tested it even on livestreaming and it works well. We\u2019re working on optimizing it even more, to work faster, and in better quality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other ongoing dev work to polish Lensa\u2019s proposition includes tweaking the auto-adjustments it makes by determining the best settings for portrait-influencing factors, such as exposure, contrast, highlights and shadows. \u201cFor each adjustment we use a neural network,\u201d he notes. \u201cThey work together\u2026 to find the best output result.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prisma is also monetizing its namesake original app \u2014 which grabbed around 70M downloads in a few months back in 2016, rising to ~100M in total to date, with Usoltsev saying they\u2019re still relying mostly on organic\/viral downloads rather than active promotion, riding the Prisma craze\u2019s long viral tail.<\/p>\n

They now have more than 100,000 paying subscribers for Prisma, though they\u2019re not breaking out active usage \u2014 beyond saying it runs into the \u201cmillions\u201d. (Back in 2017<\/a> they were reporting active monthly usage for the app of around 10M.) A premium sub offering was switched on in Prisma in January 2018.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe paying audience is actually diverse. The major group by age I think it\u2019s 24-35 year olds. And men and women is about the same proportion,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n

Last year\u2019s launch of Lensa came despite an earlier focus shift for the startup to b2b<\/a>, after the style transfer craze that had powered its namesake app\u2019s 2016 virality appeared on the cusp of being crazed (and, well, cloned<\/a>) to death.<\/p>\n

The plan, as it was in 2017, was for Prisma Labs to offer an SDK for computer vision-powered effects that developers could use to enhance their own apps. But the team kept its hand in the consumer space, maintaining their apps as testing grounds. A decision that set them up for what now looks a full reverse pivot back to consumer.<\/p>\n

Usoltsev tells us the earlier b2b switch was \u201cmostly\u201d at the behest of Prisma\u2019s investors \u2014 and wasn\u2019t something the wider team was keen on.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re fully stoked to get back to their consumer roots, he adds.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt didn\u2019t really resonate with our team experience and our company DNA,\u201d he adds of the b2b phase. \u201cBut in the process we figured out this is not what we want to do. We came up with the idea for the new product in the process and came up with the broader vision for the entire company and what we want to do.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe core team was all about consumer products and b2b was not seen as interesting topic at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s on the slate for the future, as the team thinks about other features and\/or consumer apps it might want to launch this year?<\/p>\n

\u201cRight now we\u2019re thinking a lot about video,\u201d he says. \u201cVideo is so fast growing space right now and we see a lot of new apps that break into the market \u2014 like TikTok<\/a> \u2014 that grows insanely and based on video. And we\u2019re going to provide users with automated tools to enhance their videos.<\/p>\n

\u201cVideos is more complicated to edit than photos because it requires more skill\u2026 to learn how to edit videos. And if your clip is longer than one minute it\u2019s so hard to create it because montage could be a boring process and the longer the video is the more complicated the process is. So we\u2019re going to fix this \u2014 and provide users with automated tools to help them create great videos quickly and with no effort, or as little as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

AI-enabled auto video editing is \u201cprobably\u201d going to be a standalone app, he says, rather than a feature baked into one of Prisma\u2019s existing apps. But, well, watch this space.<\/p>\n

This report was updated with a correction after the company incorrectly told us the Series A raise was \u20ac6M; it is $6M<\/em><\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunch\/social\/~3\/9OJHhzsV2UE\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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