GenIT founder and RefaceAI investor Sergey Tokarev informed that within two months 750K+ users downloaded the Ukrainian startup’s Doublicat app

Products of Ukrainian IT-developers are becoming increasingly popular in the global market. Every year, there are at least a few apps that step over the million users mark. In most cases, these are all kinds of games made in Ukrainian offices of international companies. But sometimes, original and unique products of Ukrainian startups break through to the tops of Google Play and AppStore.

At the beginning of 2020, one of those popular apps was Doublicat that let users to change faces on GIF images. The fun app was created by Ukrainian startup RefaceAI. The Doublicat release was on January 13 and almost immediately the app became popular. The GenIT founder Sergey Tokarev is a startup investor. He said that in the first two months after the release of the Doublicat app, it was used by more than 750 thousand users around the world. And every day, the number of new users keeps on growing.

“Before releasing Doublicat, the company went through several important steps. The biggest one was the development of RefaceAI technology. It was the hardest and the most time-consuming process. The next step was to create a Reflect app that allowed users to replace faces in photos. It took about 7 months to create it. The Reflect release happened last year,” says Sergey Tokarev. “The whole next year, the team was engaged in improving the technology and applying it to video. As the result, we released Doublicat that works with GIF-animation.”

According to Tokarev, in the beginning of the development process, there were only 12 people working in the company. Now, the RefaceAI team has grown to 40 specialists.

According to the investor, the main difference between Doublicat and many other similar face replacement apps is the use of its own GAN-based technology, a machine learning method.

“While most companies work with CGI (computer-generated imagery) technology, we use exclusively artificial intelligence. This approach allows us to get results with extremely realistic images,” says Sergey Tokarev.

RefaceAI investor says that smartphone apps are not the final stage of monetization of the face replacement technology. Reflect and Doublicat serve as just a kind of demonstration of opportunities that open up new business prospects.

“As an example, I can tell you about a joint project of our company with the multiplex cinema network. I am talking about a “kinoselfie” feature which is already implemented. Another example is Artificial Talent, which used our technology to create interactive 3D-models,” Tokarev said.

In general, face replacement technologies are in demand in many different directions. The founder of GenIT, highlights some of them, such as advertising, social media, video game development, and film production.