Reface investor Sergey Tokarev tells about the dizzying rise of one of the most successful Ukrainian apps and how the company has reached success.
Literally in 9 months, Reface has conquered a number of world charts and even managed to take first place in the American AppStore. It managed to take over the US market this summer. Back then, the Ukrainian app for swapping faces on videos and GIFs soared to first place in the Entertainment category leaving behind such monsters as Netflix, Instagram, and YouTube.
50 million downloads in 9 months
The app was released back in January 2020. Its first name was Doublicat. By April, it was downloaded more than a million times. Six months after the release, this number increased to five million. And in August, the app surpassed Instagram, YouTube, Zoom, Netflix, TikTok, and Amazon in the charts of a number of countries. Though, by that time it has already got a new name - Reface. By the end of the month, the number of users reached 20 million. Then, this figure almost doubled by mid-September.
‘Reface is currently in the top 10 in AppStore and in the top 20 in Google Play Top Free Entertainment Apps in the US. Every day, millions of users share GIFs and videos from the app on social media. In total, Reface has already been downloaded more than 50 million times,’ says Sergey Tokarev.
Doping-Free: 90% of the app's popularity growth is organic
World celebrities also showed their interest in the app. Reface was used by Britney Spears, Snoop Dogg, Jennifer Lopez, and many other famous people.
With Jerry Heil, a Ukrainian singer famous for the hit song ‘Okhrana, otmyena’, RefaceAI shot a video on ‘#Blogger’ where they extensively used the app's capabilities.
Such collaborations and the natural interest of users in the app made its popularity grow by 90% in an organic way. Since its release, Reface has been mentioned over 600 times in the media. Plus, the subscribers also often post videos and photos created in Reface on social media and that contributes to the natural promotion of the app as well.
How it works
Reface uses an exclusive technology, and the creators of other analogue face-swapping apps do not have it. The company's developers, unlike their colleagues, do not use CGI. Instead, they’ve got a more advanced technology based on the GAN machine learning algorithm. The use of artificial intelligence allows getting stunningly realistic images.
‘The technology implemented in Reface does not simply swap one face with another with the highest quality, it does it literally instantly. And at the same time, it is available to any user who has a smartphone. The technology developed in the company has turned out to be as simple and easy to use as possible,’ says Tokarev.
The future is with personalization and B2B
In 2021, the company expects to increase the number of subscribers to one hundred million. At the same time, Reface developers are creating new products. Soon, they are planning to release the video editor Reface Studio. And next year, they want to release the Full Body Swap function that will allow replacing not only the face but the entire user’s body on the video.
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