BELLEVUE, Wash. — Seven years after it came onto the Seattle area’s tech scene, a startup called Alitheon is making headway with a product identification system that can make sure a high-priced purse — or a high-performance airplane part — is the real deal rather than a counterfeit.
The system, known as FeaturePrint, doesn’t use barcodes or blockchain. Instead, Alitheon’s AI-enhanced software analyzes ever-so-slight irregularities in the surface of a manufactured item.
“We are able to see all of the features, flaws, aspects of the manufacturing process, however you want to define them,” Alitheon CEO Roei Ganzarski explained at Alitheon’s Bellevue headquarters. “Because they’re random and chaotic by nature, because they’re not there by design, they constitute a digital fingerprint.”
Sorting out what’s real and what’s fake is a challenge for supply chains, and finding solutions would be worth a lot of money. Experts estimate the market in counterfeit goods at more than $1 trillion per year and say that figure is steadily rising.
Ganzarski noted that the idea of tracking variations in manufacturing tolerances isn’t new. “What’s really new is the intellectual property that we’ve developed which allows us to do this with standard, off-the-shelf cameras,” he said. “So, no need for spectral imaging, no infrared, none of that nonsense. Just a standard camera. In fact, we can do it with a cellphone.” And he proceeded to demonstrate …
