Snapchat bought Odessa startup Looksery

The founders of the mobile application for messaging in 2012, the year refused three billion dollars, which they offered Mark Zuckerberg for the project.

In 2015, Snapchat helped the Ukrainian team to accomplish the largest exit in the history of Ukrainian startups so far.

It also became known that Odessa Looksery became part of Snapchat. CEO Looksery Viktor Shaburov and company employees declined comment.

The amount of the transaction, according to AIN.UA, was about $ 150 million. According to rumors, the entire development team of the Ukrainian application from Odessa will move to the United States.

A separate Looksery application disappeared from the AppStore, becoming part of the Snapchat application — if you tap the looksery filters on the screen while recording a video call, tap the image of your face.

Looksery is a program for mobile devices that allows you to change your own face in real time to look beautiful in a photo, and even during video chat. Using the application, you can lose weight, grow fat, even out skin color and eliminate its defects, change anything from eye color to the shape of a skull, apply animation of a cartoon hero or a horror movie hero on your face.

But the project earned, mostly not on the application, but on the licensing of its technology. Although the application was successful: three million downloads of the iOS version a few months after launch.

Due to the fact that we managed to quickly find customers in Western markets, the team very quickly reached a profitability, generating an unprecedented $ 1 million turnover per month for a Ukrainian startup.