Our Investment in Vetted: Discover The Best Products, Brands and Deals For You
Online product and brand discovery are broken. As consumers, the sources we've come to rely on are no longer aligned with our best interests but rather the business models of the service providers:
- Amazon search returns thousands of 4.5-star reviews, most of which are gamed or fake.
- Google returns a set of pages sorted by sponsored ads and SEO spam.
- Forums and product review sites are hard to navigate and littered with affiliate links.
- The authenticity of #ad #sponsored posts by social media influencers is undoubtedly in question.
None of this should surprise consumers, as this is the bi-product of our dependence on free-to-use services.
We believe consumers are looking for a highly knowledgeable friend who has conducted the most up-to-date research and analysis of all the available options. This friend would then distill the choices to a few that make sense based on our specific criteria. We want them to know which product from which retailer satisfies our needs based on the dimensions (price, value, aesthetic, availability, etc.) ranked by what we care most about, not to mention omnipresent wherever and whenever we're shopping for products.
Enter Vetted (formerly known as Lustre), a next-gen product search engine built for consumers. They've developed a proprietary AI/ML discovery and recommendation engine that continuously scours the web to connect consumers with the best products and merchants.
The first product they've brought to market is a series of browser extensions (Chrome, Safari, and Firefox) that come along for the ride during your shopping experience. They help you identify and select the products directly on the retailers' website while providing price comparisons, deal availability and comparable alternatives.
We're excited for Vetted to formally announce its $14M Series A financing round led by Insight Ventures. We previously co-led the pre-seed and seed rounds with Bling Capital, Index Ventures, Panache Ventures and several notable angels.
The road to building Vetted has been a steadfast, mission-driven pursuit for the team. The technology supporting this product is both complex and a heavy lift. We met CEO and co-founder Stuart Kearney and his co-founders Tim Etler and Tom Raleigh in 2018 and were immediately taken by their passion and resiliency surrounding the problem.
We believe the product and brand discovery challenges consumers face will only grow. Stuart articulates this well:
“As ecommerce has grown and platforms like Shopify have made it incredibly easy for anyone to launch brands, the number of products people have to choose between has exploded and become fragmented over thousands of stores. This created a massive discovery problem which fueled equally massive ad spend on Amazon, Google, and Facebook to attempt to reach the consumer.
As a result, a product’s success has far more to do with how much the brand can afford to spend on ads rather than its quality or value for money.
In order to best serve the consumer, ecommerce desperately needs a new solution that aggregates products and knowledge without being gated behind ad spend (the cost of which is directly passed to the consumer).”
Next time you think about which product or brand to research and which product to buy, give the Vetted search engine a spin!
Vetted is a distributed team with an HQ in California. They're hiring for several roles across the globe. If you're interested in working with an incredibly talented team on cutting-edge search technology, look at some of their open positions.
