Founded by Jewel Burks Solomon and Jason Crain in 2013, Partpic was an Atlanta-based visual recognition technology startup that made its debut at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2014. It claimed to save its users time and money by looking up maintenance, repair, and operations parts through a picture taken from the user's phone or tablet. The service would then provide users all the information and specifications regarding that part.
The company was created after Burks realized how difficult it was to shop for industrial parts as many customers didn’t know how to describe them. She decided to apply computer vision technology to the problem, creating a service that simplified the shopping experience. In 2016, Amazon acquired Partpic.
After acquiring Partpic in 2016, Amazon was seen releasing a similar service by the name of Part Finder. Part Finder allowed users to scan parts, match them, and then buy them from Amazon’s product listings. When it was released, the feature could identify thousands of parts, according to Amazon.
Partpic was obviously the technology behind this venture. However, the e-commerce giant didn’t credit the company. At the time of the acquisition, the founder of Partpic Jewel Burks was hired as the team lead of visual search at Amazon’s subsidiary A9.com. According to her, she was able to continue some of the work she had done with Partpic which suggests that the team may have been behind Amazon’s Part Finder as well.
Partpic’s website currently displays a message that informs users of the acquisition. There has been no news about the company ever since.
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