“I spent a weekend making Wombos every single person I sent them to died of laugher – and then they sent it to 10 people who also died of laughter,” said Alexander McIsaac, a Toronto-based partner with GFC. Investors include Global Founders Capital (GFC), actor Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures, the chief executives of Product Hunt and Machine Zone, Launch House and Germany’s 468 Capital. Benkhin was smoking a joint on his apartment roof, and it has raised US$6-million, valuing the 10-person startup at US$40-million. Wombo began as an idea last August when Mr. The app’s rapid initial success has also attracted investors. About two million people use it daily, making Wombo one of the most rapidly proliferating consumer apps to come out of Canada. Wombo has also generated hundreds of thousands of dollars so far from in-app advertising and premium access to an extended library of songs. (The Google Play store says Wombo has been downloaded more than 10 million times Apple doesn’t provide similar data). According to the company, the app has been downloaded 49 million times in its first three months and used to generate 640 million shareable clips. Featured are images of Globe journalist Sean Silcoff, Yoda, The Queen and E.Tīut Wombo is also intended to go extremely viral – and it has. Wombo in action: Here is a compendium of videos made using the Wombo lip synching app, which transforms still pictures into videos using artificial intelligence. founder Ben-Zion Benkhin, a 25-year-old University of Toronto dropout with a chill, confident demeanour. “We don’t want to fool anybody into thinking the video they’re looking at is real,” says Wombo Studios Inc. Imagine the Queen singing I Will Survive like a diva and you get the picture. Users of the app, called Wombo, can do the same with uploaded images of unsuspecting friends and relatives, celebrities, Yoda or even painted portraits. Within seconds, the photos transform into videos featuring exaggerated versions of themselves, with heads bobbing, eyes rolling, shoulders swaying and lips synching to snippets of pop songs. Their startup enables people to snap selfies and bring the still images to life.
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Log In Create Free AccountĪrtificial intelligence has been used to discover drugs, predict floods, uncover fraud and cut greenhouse gas emissions.Ī group of twentysomething Torontonians have put the technology to a different use.