Russian app developer Prisma Labs best known for its work on photo and video AR filter app Prisma is shifting its focus to the enterprise segment and is starting a new business-to-business operation, the company confirmed. Its augmented reality solution for applying live filters to photographs and videos will now be offered to other companies as a customizable platform, with Prisma Labs hoping that the versatility of the machine vision service will be enough to attract some high-profile customers and generate significant revenue for the company. Prisma Labs co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Alexey Moiseenkov described the move as the latest step in the company’s effort to promote deep learning solutions and their implementations in the communications segment, adding that despite the potential of this emerging technology, many businesses still don’t have the necessary technological backing and experience to develop their own services, which is a demand that the Russian software firm is now hoping to fulfill going forward.
Prisma’s solutions are unique in the way they operate seeing how they don’t require cloud technologies to work, consequently being more efficient and secure than many of their alternatives. This implementation still comes at a cost of difficult development, which is why the firm is offering interested businesses not just a technological platform but its own expertise and experience with using and adapting it. The new business direction still won’t lead the company to discontinue the Prisma Android app which was released in mid-2015 and garnered a lot of popularity ever since, though many of its features were later copied by the likes of Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram.
The Prisma app will hence continue living as a proof of concept of sorts, though it’s currently unclear how frequently will the company update it with new functionalities. The service still boasts more than five million monthly active users, the vast majority of which is from the United States, though Prisma reportedly never monetized the app in an efficient manner. The company introduced a new styles store earlier this year but was still adamant not to charge users for it, indicating that its B2B shift has been planned for some time.