Are your thingamobs broken? Did the knob fall off of your widget? Partpic has you covered. The company, which is launching at the TC Startup Battlefield in San Francisco, was created to allow consumers to snap a picture of a replacement part and immediately receive a part number and order page in return.
“Partpic was born out of necessity. Transitioning from Google to McMaster-Carr, a 100+ year old company that has mastered supply chain, but has evolved slower in adopting new technologies, our co-founder Jewel Burks recognized very clearly there were many problems in the parts distribution process. A huge opportunity to better serve customers existed for suppliers and distributors if they were willing to evolve,” said Jason Crain, COO.
The company is built for the enterprise. The goal is to offer easy-to-use image recognition apps for large suppliers and they’re attempting to move warehouse logistics away from the “text/label” style of retrieval into a more interesting visual recognition system.
[gallery ids="1054857,1054846,1054855,1054854,1054853,1054852,1054850,1054849,1054848,1054847"]
The company was founded in frustration.
“Jewel Burks was working in sales management at a large industrial distributor, and became increasingly frustrated with the difficulty associated with searching for parts. She witnessed that both the staff members she supervised and the customers they served met challenges when trying to search for parts without key information such as part number or supplier name,” said Crain.
Burks hired two Georgia Tech Ph.D.s, Troy Nunnally and Nashlie Sephus, to help build an image-recognition system that can quickly scan parts bins and make assessments on part number and style based on a simple snapshot.
“This is fun. Everybody understands the problem we are solving and are eager to use our technology,” said Burks.
[gallery ids="1053503,1053504,1053505,1053506"]