Snapchat bought Looksery to supercharge its animated selfie filters, and now Facebook has made an image filtering acquisition of its own to keep up the messaging pace. Today, the company confirmed that it has bought Masquerade, another app that adds fantastical filters to your smartphone-generated images, but this time focused on video. The startup (written usually as MSQRD) confirmed the acquisition in a blog post, while Facebook confirmed the news to us directly.
“Masquerade has built a fantastic app, MSQRD, with world-class imaging technology for video. We’re excited to welcome Masquerade to our team and continue enhancing the Facebook video experience,” a spokesperson for Facebook said. The company has been putting a big emphasis on expanding its video features, including its video editing tools to add features like stickers and texts on images, and this is part of that strategy.
MSQRD, which had been based out of Belarus, will continue to release its app as a standalone product. Facebook says that key members of the team, Eugene Nevgen, Sergey Gonchar and Eugene Zatepyakin, will work out of its London office.
MSQRD and Facebook are not disclosing the price of the deal, but interestingly, it was only two weeks ago that an investor out of Russia, Eugene Gordeev, posted that MSQRD was getting acquired by Apple for about $117 million. It was a pure hoax, Gordeev confirmed to us.
MSQRD appeared to have one investor, Yuri Gurski of Gagarin Capital, and it has been on a steady rise in popularity since launching las year.
See our video review of the app here.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/TV7ApcXC0bw/