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Vetted, a startup formerly known as Lustre, today announced it has secured $14 million in funding to develop an AI-powered platform for product reviews. The funding comes as part of a Series A led by Insight Partners, with participation from Index Ventures, Bling Capital, Golden Ventures and angels including former Commerce Meta VP Shiva Rajaraman, co-founder Stuart Kearney He told TechCrunch: Invested in scaling Vetted’s machine learning technology.
Launched broadly today, Kearney describes Vetted’s platform as “a product search engine for discovering the brands and products that best meet your needs.” He worked at the NASA Ames Research Center on “Smallsat” (a spacecraft about the size of a kitchen refrigerator) and worked as a systems engineer for the Australian Department of Defense before starting a company with Tim Ettler and Tom Rowley. rice field.
“We founded Vetted because we felt online shopping was overwhelming and frankly an anti-consumer experience,” Kearney told TechCrunch in an email. You don’t have to spend hours sifting through indistinguishable products on thousands of ad-laden sites filled with unreliable information.”
According to Kearney, it shows vetted reviews for specific products from The New York Times’ Wirecutter, Reddit, YouTube, and other “reputable” sites (although Reddit always meets that criteria). Some might argue that it is not.) Available on the web or as a browser extension, the platform compares prices across merchants, tracks changes, and delivers alerts when sales occur.
Image credit: Scrutinized
There are many product comparison tools such as PayPal owned Honey and Paribus (now Capital One Shopping). But what sets Vetted apart is that it uses AI to identify top products in various categories, Kearney said. Vetted ranks products based on over 10,000 factors, including reviewer credibility, brand credibility, enthusiast consensus and past generation performance. As prices change, new products and reviews appear, the platform updates the rankings and our team of 30 “product experts” ensure the results are accurate.
“We built a unique named entity recognition technology that identifies brand and product mentions. We then analyze user sentiment towards them and use vectorization techniques to group similar products and We will do further analysis,” said Kearney. “This allows him to transform the chaos of thousands of threads into, for example, a well-organized summary of his Reddit opinions on a particular product or brand.”
Carney wouldn’t disclose how Vetted’s ranking algorithm weights different factors to quantify more subjective aspects of product reviews, such as “trustworthiness.” He also didn’t reveal what work was done behind the scenes to allow Vetted to analyze reviews from different groups of people equally. AI models trained to understand a particular terminology (such as standard English) tend to perform poorly when exposed to unfamiliar text.
Kearney said some of the new funding will be used to deploy more advanced search technology and an AI system to organize and understand product knowledge on the forums. He said shoppers who used his Vetted before the rebrand (when it was Luster) had a 70% chance of buying one of the platform’s suggestions, and followed Vetted’s recommendations. He said he was suggesting that he trusted him.
“As e-commerce has grown and platforms like Shopify have made it incredibly easy for anyone to launch a brand, the number of products people have to choose from has exploded. and fragmented across thousands of stores, which created a massive discovery problem and led to massive ad dollars being spent on Amazon, Google and Facebook alike trying to reach consumers.” continues Kearney. “As a result, the success of a product has more to do with whether brands can afford to spend on advertising than on its quality or cost-effectiveness. are desperately in need of new solutions that bring together products and knowledge without being tied to advertising costs, which are passed on directly to consumers.”
Image credit: Scrutinized
So how does Vetted plan to make money? Affiliate links to storefronts are one-way. The rest are still under consideration, but Kearney has affirmed that Vetted has no intention of monetizing the data the platform collects. “The only data we collect is fully anonymized, aggregated and related to general search performance to ensure it is useful to our users,” he said.
When asked about the economic climate and whether it would affect business, Carney expressed no concern.Vetted has over 330,000 users, many of whom joined before the rebrand. So the company has “many years” of runway and plans to increase headcount by 30% in the coming months, he says.
“With a downturn in the economy, funds can be tight, and we believe Vetted will be an even more powerful way for people to grow their money without the burden of constant research,” said Kearney. . “Our main competition is people’s existing habits for online shopping, such as Google’s ‘best’. [blank’] I spend hours perusing every review and comparing products. ”
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