[Solution Report] Their Startup and Future <14> MarkVision CEO Lee Inseop
AI 24-Hour Monitoring and Analysis... Over 100,000 Counterfeit Products Removed Monthly
"With the Korean Wave fever, the issue of counterfeit goods is becoming serious in China and Southeast Asia, and we will take the lead in protecting the intellectual property rights of K-brands in these regions." There was confidence in the words of Lee In-seop, CEO of MarkVision. It is a startup's challenge to change the reality where counterfeit goods flood China and other countries as soon as our companies' carefully developed products become popular. His and MarkVision's weapon is artificial intelligence (AI). The speed of detecting counterfeit goods in the e-commerce market has increased, and costs have decreased.
On the 5th, CEO Lee said in an interview with Asia Economy, "Currently, more than 20 companies are using MarkVision's solution to detect and remove over 100,000 counterfeit products per month on e-commerce platforms where intellectual property rights infringements frequently occur." MarkVision's service involves AI that has learned companies' brands and products based on images and text, monitoring sales sites 24 hours a day. Through image recognition technology, it quickly finds counterfeit products that look similar among the items being sold. For products difficult to identify by image alone, it analyzes text data such as price, product information, and customer reviews using machine learning. The accuracy of judgment reaches 90%. Suspected counterfeit cases found by AI go through final judgment by each company's representatives and can be reported to the sales site with a single click. This enables automatic intellectual property (IP) protection in the e-commerce market.
CEO Lee's choice of an AI-based IP protection automation platform as a business model reflects his experience. After majoring in economics at Harvard University, he worked at the German Central Bank and then at consulting firm McKinsey. While providing solutions for hacking, information leaks, and payment fraud in McKinsey's corporate risk management department, he developed an interest in this field. Thinking that legal understanding was also necessary, he entered Harvard Law School and began to study intellectual property rights and the counterfeit goods market in earnest. Seeing that the limitations of manual responses could be solved with AI technology, he started the company with Vinny May, a developer-turned-chief technology officer (CTO) who was attending law school with him.
CEO Lee's business is still in its infancy, having established the company in Boston, USA last year, launched a pilot version locally in March this year, and released the service domestically in July. However, results are already emerging. He said, "Currently, we are automatically detecting and removing counterfeit products on e-commerce platforms with frequent intellectual property rights infringements such as Amazon, Taobao, Tmall, AliExpress, and eBay," adding, "We cover 18 e-commerce platforms across 9 countries."
Customers are rapidly increasing, mainly among domestic and international companies related to beauty, fashion, content, and food. Automating the existing method where people manually find and report counterfeit goods has significantly reduced time and costs. According to CEO Lee, the manual process costs about 20,000 KRW per detection and takes about 30 minutes, whereas using MarkVision's solution costs only 760 KRW per detection and takes just 36 seconds. He explained, "One company that used to detect about 100 counterfeit products per month found over 3,000 after using the service. The biggest advantage is that it greatly reduces the exhausting and inefficient process."
CEO Lee believes that the global e-commerce market has rapidly grown due to the spread of COVID-19 this year, and the online distribution of counterfeit goods has also greatly increased. The size of the online counterfeit goods market was estimated at about 800 trillion KRW last year and is expected to reach about 1,000 trillion KRW this year. He foresees that MarkVision's role will grow accordingly. He said, "When counterfeit goods are distributed, companies face not only immediate sales declines but also long-term brand image damage and loss of consumer trust. We are currently expanding our service focusing on the Asian market, and next year we plan to enter the European e-commerce market and connect a total of 100 e-commerce platforms to cover 97% of the global e-commerce market."
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