REDWOOD CITY, Calif.,
Oct. 13, 2021 /PRNewswire/
-- Poshmark, Inc. (Nasdaq: POSH), a leading social marketplace
for new and secondhand style for women, men, kids, pets, home and
more, today announced that it has acquired Suede One, a platform
that combines machine learning, computer vision and expert human
review to virtually authenticate sneakers. The Suede One team will
join the Poshmark team, effective today.
This deal marks Poshmark's first acquisition and reflects the
company's focus on strategic investments that drive continued
platform innovation, accelerate growth in high-growth resale
categories and enhance the user experience to attract and retain
both buyers and sellers.
"We are laser focused on making strategic investments that fuel
the continued growth of our business, give the best overall
experience for buyers and make our marketplace the number one, most
trusted destination for sellers," said Manish Chandra, founder and CEO of Poshmark.
"Suede One has built impressive capabilities in virtual
authentication that will allow us to deliver tangible benefits to
our community, scale our authentication services in a meaningful
way, and accelerate our momentum in sneakers as well as luxury
goods, two of the fastest-growing categories in the resale space.
We are thrilled to welcome the Suede One team to Poshmark and look
forward to what we can build together."
Founded in 2020, Suede One's technology enables an inventoryless
approach to authentication. The technology analyzes product images,
running algorithms on consistencies to identify whether an item is
real or counterfeit. For popular sneakers such as Jordan 1s and Yeezy 350s, Suede One can
automatically authenticate the majority of submissions with greater
than 99% accuracy, based on internal testing. For other sneaker
types, human experts review the submission with help from the
company's proprietary authenticator tool. Suede One has built a
reputation for credible and quick authentication with the broader
resale community as well as esteemed resellers, authenticating a
pair of Nike Air Yeezy 1 Prototypes that sold for $1.8 million at auction.
"We built this company to solve a key challenge for the reseller
community—creating technology that protects them from fraud
and ensures fast, accurate authentication that they can rely on,"
said Matt Forloine, CEO of Suede
One. "Poshmark and Suede One share the same values of trust and
focus on community, and by joining forces we'll be able to advance
our technology and scale these services to more products and
categories and benefit as many people as possible."
Suede One's virtual authentication capabilities will complement
Posh Protect, which guarantees a full refund for any item not
matching its listing description, and Posh Authenticate, which will
continue to offer free authentication by Poshmark's team of luxury
experts for orders of $500 or more.
With this acquisition, Poshmark will be able to augment and scale
these services to support both buyers and sellers on more
transactions and begin offering virtual authentication for sneakers
at multiple price points, with the potential to expand to
additional categories.
About Poshmark
Poshmark is a leading social
marketplace for new and secondhand style for women, men, kids,
pets, home and more. By combining the human connection of physical
shopping with the scale, ease, and selection benefits of
e-commerce, Poshmark makes buying and selling simple, social, and
sustainable. Its community of more than 80 million registered users
across the U.S., Canada,
Australia and India, is driving the future of commerce while
promoting more sustainable consumption. For more information,
please visit www.poshmark.com, and for company news and
announcements, please visit investors.poshmark.com. You can also
find Poshmark on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Pinterest,
YouTube, and Snapchat.
Media Contact
pr@poshmark.com
Investor Contact
ir@poshmark.com
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SOURCE Poshmark