20-year-old Ukrainian sold an application for Snapchat for $ 8 million

Five employees left to work for an American company.

Фото: Depositphotos

The American giant continues to absorb projects created by Ukrainians. This time, Snap bought a team of 5 leading experts and rights to all technologies of the startup Teleport Future Technologies.

The agreement was signed in February 2018 and fully implemented in November. The amount of the transaction was about $ 8 million. About LIGA.net said a reliable source in the market.

Teleport became famous for the application of the same name, which dyes hair in photos in different colors.

Photo: @reginatodorenko (Regina Todorenko)

The project has created then still 19-year-old Odessa Vladislav Urazov. He and his partner, Bogdan Matveev, assembled a team of 30 people from various countries, including Ukraine, France, England and Russia. The startup attracted $ 1 million of investments and developed an internal technology for identifying objects in photos and videos.

Teleport set a record in the Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian App Store, gaining more than 1 a million downloads in the first days after the release. He more than a week ranked first in app stores.

Founders of the company: Bogdan Matveev (CTO), Vladislav Urazov (CEO), Viktor Koch (Strategy). Photo: tech.liga.net

According to According to social network Linkedin, the startup’s co-founder and Chief Scientist, Sergey Demyanov, joined the Snap team. He came to Teleport from IBM and moved from London to Moscow. After the deal, Sergey Demyanov took the position of Machine Learning Team Lead at Snapchat's headquarters in Los Angeles.

Sergey Demyanov. Photo: tech.liga.net

Interestingly, one of the co-founders of the startup was also 19-year-old Robert Birov, the son of European politician Andrei Birov, who previously headed the Administration of the President of Estonia.

Robert Birov. Photo: tech.liga.net

LIGA.net asked Vladislav Urazov to comment on the news and future plans.

“I can confirm that the best of our developers have indeed moved to Los Angeles/London and are now working there at Snap, including using Teleport technologies. In general, I see 3 cool international companies that are absolutely right now relying on ML specialists from the post-Soviet space - these are Samsung, PicsArt and, of course, Snap. I think these companies have a great future in AI. Regarding plans: in the near future, my partners and I are planning to launch our own fund, which will invest in AI startups. I am confident that we will be able to get into the unicorns that will definitely appear in our field in the coming years,” he replied.

Incidentally, as a result of the deal, Odessa became a dollar millionaire in 20 years.

Recall Snap is not the first time buying a team from a project with Ukrainian roots. In 2015, the American social network bought Odessa startup Looksery. According to rumors, the transaction amount was $ 150 million.

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