Short · 2026-09-29
Stampsy, and the chatbot built from its co-founder's messages.
A New York visual storytelling platform, listed in 2015, whose co-founder Roman Mazurenko was killed that November; his friend Eugenia Kuyda later built a chatbot from his text messages in her company's app.
Stampsy's March 2015 listing described "a place for sharing creative ideas, stories and experiences in visual form." The New York company wanted to carry the old forms of art books, fashion magazines, cultural zines and photo journals into something digital and social. The image it used is a fan of story pages: photographs, video frames and blocks of text laid out on a purple background.
It had been a while in the making. In October 2012, VentureBeat reported an $800,000 seed round for Stampsy, founded by Roman Mazurenko and Sergey Gromov, with eight employees and an iPad app on the way. The web platform launched in late February 2015; in March, The Next Web described a free, advertising-free community where people built visual stories out of "stamps," and quoted Mazurenko on what he wanted it to be. By April, Mazurenko told Cult of Mac, it had 43,000 users.
In November 2015, Mazurenko was killed in a car accident in Moscow. A year later, IBTimes UK reported, drawing on The Verge, that his friend Eugenia Kuyda, chief executive of the startup Luka, had fed his text messages into a neural network to build a chatbot that people could talk to in the Luka app.
We could not establish what became of Stampsy after 2015. The stampsy.com site still loads under the Stampsy name, and it still serves a page titled "Remembering Roman".