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The Tinder parent Match Group wants to take over the South Korean company Hyperconnect for 1.725 billion US dollars (the equivalent of 1.42 billion euros). Hyperconnect operates the Azar apps for video chats and Hakuna Live for live streaming, which are particularly popular in Asia. The startup, founded in Seoul in 2014, is profitable and uses artificial intelligence (AI) developed in-house for facial recognition and real-time translations.
Hyperconnect is expected to increase its sales in 2020 by half to $ 200 million. The video chat app Azar has been downloaded more than a billion times since 2014 and is particularly intended to connect people with common interests. Speech and text are translated into other languages in real time.
Since 2019 the company has also been operating the live streaming app Hakuna Live. So far, it has 23 million downloads, primarily in South Korea and Japan. The Match Group’s takeover of Hyperconnects is expected to be completed in the second quarter of 2021.
Mobile WebRTC and Google Cloud APIs
Over 75 percent of Hyperconnect users and sales come from Asia. That’s supposed to A sensible addition to the Match Group’s portfolio, according to their boss Shar Dubey. The purchase of Hyperconnects is Match Group’s largest acquisition to date. In addition to the world market leader Tinder, the company also owns more than 45 other dating services, including match.com, Meetic, Hinge, OKCupid and Plenty Of Fish.
Hyperconnect claims to have developed the world’s first mobile version of WebRTC. This open standard connects conversation partners directly with one another, without going through a server. This reduces latencies. WebRTC has recently become the official standard at W3C and IETF. Mobile WebRTC should enable image and video transmissions in good quality even with a suboptimal network connection and with cheaper mobile devices. Hyperconnect also uses artificial intelligence to get by with little device memory and less powerful hardware.
Hyperconnect also enables users to communicate with one another in different languages. The Koreans use the Google Cloud APIs for quick conversion from speech to text and immediate translation. Hyperconnect also has Facial recognition technology with which portraits can be adapted based on a template.
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