Prisma Launches Website to Share Its Deep Learning Tech With Other Companies

Prisma was all the craze in 2016. And you'll still find the odd artistic Prisma-generated photo on Instagram and Facebook. But the startup behind the AI-based app wants to continue to stay relevant amidst competition from the likes of Facebook and Microsoft, and it hopes to do so by moving into the B2B space. The company believes that its technology can be used by for a range of purposes and is planning to sell its tools to third-party developers.

In order to promote its new service, the company launched a website - prismalabs.ai - that provides APIs and SDKs to developers to incorporate its deep learning models in their apps. In a statement to The Verge, Prisma CEO and co-founder Alexey Moiseenkov says, "We see big opportunities in deep learning and communication."

"We feel that a lot of companies need expertise in this area. Even Google is buying companies for computer vision. We can help companies put machine vision in their app because we understand how to implement the technology," Moiseenkov says. The company plans to offer machine vision tools like segmentation, face mapping, object recognition, among others to developers.

This shift in focus towards B2B, however, does not mean that the company will stop support for the Prisma app. Moiseenkov assures that support for the app, which currently sees between 5 million and 10 million monthly active users, will continue. Back in April, Prisma Labs rolled out an in-app filter store to the app that allows users to search for both free and paid filters.

Companies like Facebook have been working on implementing various filtering tools to their in-app cameras, leading many to believe that a startup like Prisma could be eventually bought, much like the acquisition of popular face-swapping app MSQRD last year. In a pretty vague email reply to The Verge, co-founder Aram Airapetyan says, "We want to go on doing what we do and what we can do best. The whole team is super motivated and passionately committed to what we do! So the rest doesn't matter (where, when, with whom)."