SXSWorld
Issue link: https://sxsw.uberflip.com/i/600882
3 0 S X S W o r l d | N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 5 | S X S W. C O M rying to buy something without being able to name or identify it involves a lot of effort and frustration. PartPic co-founder and COO Jason Crain says his company's product can make one of the most tedious buyer experiences nearly seamless. "Say you need a specific bolt for your bed. You would take that bolt into Home Depot. You have to find the aisle. You have to find where the bolts are. You have to then find the bolt with your specific length, diameter, threads per inch—all these different details to make sure you have the exact same bolt," said Crain. "Understanding what the part is can be very difficult." But if a big box retailer has PartPic, it becomes very easy. "Our technology would identify and find the parts that they need in a matter of seconds just by taking a picture," said Crain. It wasn't a visual recognition or e-commerce expert who came up with this idea; it was a sales representative inundated with harried customers either upset about receiving the wrong parts or tired of the process of ordering ones with no clear identifications. When PartPic co-founder and CEO Jewel Burks was working in sales for a large hardware supplier, she realized that part identification could be revo- lutionized with the right application of visual identification. Burks and Crain met while working at Google, and she began attending tech meetups at Georgia Tech to find out what it would take to build a system that could take the frustration out of parts ordering. Things happened quickly: By last spring, PartPic had won the 2015 SXSW Accelerator Enterprise and Smart Data Technologies Grand Prize, TechCrunch Disrupt's Best Enterprise Disrupter, and a $100,000 investment from a victory at Steve Case's Rise of the Rest Atlanta. The company also recently closed a $1.5 million seed round and is in private beta testing with its first customers. "Since South By, we've been able to aggressively hire a full-time team," said Crain. That team is working to perfect what is a very sophis- ticated and complicated system that can recognize part measurements and attributes from a photo, an intense undertaking when some manufacturers have more than half a million unique parts, often with no identifying markings. PartPic builds an image database for the cus- tomer, either taking pictures of each part or obtaining them from the manufacturer, then catalogs each part's unique attributes (down to the finish), and trains algo- rithms to recognize the images and match them to the correct parts. Not only is customer frustration mitigated, but sup- pliers become more efficient. "They spend a lot of money on reordering parts, getting the first order wrong," said Crain. "If the conver- sation with that sales rep isn't accurate, and they send you out the wrong part, now that customer is behind on whatever project they needed to fulfill, and they will then have to pay to restock and repackage all of those parts that they sent out because there was an error in the ordering process. This is a tool they can use to decrease the errors in the ordering process and also as a sales tool to provide a service for their customers to sell more efficiently and in abundance because of the ease of use." PartPic's base in Atlanta is advantageous for a number of reasons, says Crain. The cost of living is lower, several large parts manu- facturers and distributors are easily accessible, and Georgia Tech has a top digital signal processing program and provides access to the kind of talent the company needs to build its system, including CTO Nashlie Sephus, a recent Georgia Tech PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Atlanta may not be the typical location for a tech company, but it's one that gives PartPic access to an excellent field of potential customers, employees and mentors. "We are a team of diverse entrepreneurs," said Crain. "In the technology industry, there's not many who look like us that are VC-backed companies." And because of that, this summer PartPic was invited to take part in the first White House Demo Day, an event designed to promote inclusive entrepreneurship. PartPic demonstrated its product to the President, one of six companies selected for the honor. President Obama was shown how to photograph a bolt with a penny for scale as Burks and Crain described the company's genesis and goals. "The benefits of things like White House Demo Day is this acknowledgment that people of non-stereotypical backgrounds can and are doing work that is revolutionary, and building businesses to solve problems in a very real and understandable way. There are not many that have computer technology companies," said Crain. "We are not only working on technology solutions, we are doing some- thing that's extremely hard and extremely unique and doing it in a very unique way." T SXSW Accelerator takes place Saturday, March 12 and Sunday, March 13. See sxsw.com/interactive/awards/accelerator for more details. PartPic's Image ID Platform Saves Hassles, Earns Accolades by SuSan elizabeth Shepard Pa r t Pic co - fou n d e r s J a s o n Cr a in a n d J ewel B u rk s w it h Pres i d e n t B a r a ck O b a m a a t W hi te H ou s e D e m o D ay T L A W R E N C E J A C K S O N