Poshmark Inc. acquired Suede One, a platform that combines machine learning, computer vision and human review to virtually authenticate sneakers. Suede One said its employees would join the Poshmark team.
This deal marks Poshmark’s first acquisition and the company’s focus “on investments that drive platform innovation, accelerate high-growth resale categories and enhance the user experience to attract and retain 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, 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. Its technology analyzes product images, running algorithms on consistencies to identify whether an item is real or counterfeit. For popular sneakers, Suede One can authenticate the majority of submissions with “greater than 99 percent accuracy,” based on internal testing. For other sneaker types, human experts review the submission with the help from its proprietary authenticator tool.
“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, 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 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 said it would be able to augment and scale these services to support 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.
