Poshmark launches Posh Lens with Naver's AI tech

South Korea's Naver Corp. announced on Thursday that Poshmark, the US-based social e-commerce C2C (consumer-to-consumer) marketplace, has launched an image search tool "Posh Lens".

Naver acquired Poshmark in January while aiming to boost profits with HyperCLOVA X, an updated version of its AI platform.

Posh Lens finds products matching or similar to user-uploaded images in women's and men's clothing, shoes, and bags categories. Initially available to US users, the feature will be expanded to more markets. 

Posh Lens marks the first service launched by Poshmark utilizing Naver's technology. The AI image search, derived from Naver's "Smart Lens", forms the basis of this new feature.

Both firms aim to enhance the synergy between Naver's tech and Poshmark's user community, starting with Posh Lens. Their goal is to deliver a unique user experience and secure leadership in the global C2C market.

The AI image search technology embedded in Naver's Smart Lens automatically identifies objects within an image and locates similar images, thus enhancing search usability. With Smart Lens, users can conduct specialized searches across a variety of topics such as shopping, text recognition, and wine labels, even if they do not know the exact name of the product.

In the past year, Smart Lens has incorporated multimodal AI, which learns complex information such as text and images simultaneously. This evolution provides users with more detailed information by enabling the addition of text after capturing an image, resulting in a more efficient and effective search service.

Meanwhile, Poshmark plans to continue collaborating with Naver to expand "Posh Shows", a live commerce function that was introduced following the acquisition by Naver.

Write to Ji-Eun Jeong at jeong@hankyung.com