Interview with Prisma CEO Alexey Moiseenkov shows an app that broke charts without marketing

Prisma is the hit photography application that launched this summer and introduced machine generated art into social media feeds. The application went viral on the App Store as well as the Play Store , and managed to do it with only word of mouth publicity. This organic growth is revealed in interviews the CEO of Prisma, Alexey Moiseenkov gave ET  and Business Insider .

Alexey Moiseenkov is the only face of the company, and he refuses to give details on the 9 employees in his office, to protect them from media calls. The intention is to retain their focus. The company has a zero marketing policy, and its success can only be attributed to organic growth. The app is particularly popular in Russia and India. Instead of layering on an effect over a photo, Prisma uses artificial intelligence to redraw the entire image. Tweaks in the naming of the app, as well as a change in the icon, may also have helped the app grow.

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Prisma did not really create the technology that powers the app. It is the same, open source algorithms that power deepart.io . The web app is expensive, and costs 59€ (about Rs 4,460) for a high resolution, watermark free image, that can take up to twenty four hours to be generated. There are free tiers of the service, but these are low resolution, watermarked, and time consuming. Innovation by Prisma engineers was to make the AI generation faster, by up to 1,000 times. This allowed for artificial intelligence processing of images in almost the same time it takes to slap on an Instagram filter.

As far as future plans are concerned, Prisma did try out a Facebook Live with real-time generation of prismatic effects. Moiseenkov stated there are plans for rolling out video and VR support, which would take up a lot more computation power. As a response to a question on a possible Facebook buyout, Moiseenkov said “no comments.”