Partpic

Jewel Burks Solomon

Atlanta, Georgia
Cofounder & CEO, Partpic (Acquired by Amazon)

Partpic leverages visual recognition technology to help enterprise customers identify industrial parts and save time during maintenance and repairs.

Earlier in my career, I worked in enterprise sales, including for Google and for an industrial parts company, called McMaster-Carr. While at McMaster-Carr, I thought there must be a better way to organize and identify parts using technology—which led me to found Partpic. Users could take a picture of the part they were looking for and Partpic would match it to the correct replacement. We licensed the technology to companies for their websites to help their customers find the parts they needed.

Starting out, we had bootstrapped before raising a seed round. We were actually in the process of trying to raise another round of funding when we were acquired. We were in talks with Amazon about investing in Partpic when the conversation turned into an acquisition offer. It moved too quickly for me to solicit other company acquisition offers, but the investment offers we had coming in helped to raise the acquisition value.

At the time of the acquisition in 2016, we were about four years old and had a team of 15 employees. All but one joined Amazon after the acquisition as part of the Amazon visual search team in Atlanta. Our team was responsible for integrating and building what became Amazon Part Finder, which was released in 2018, about 18 months after we were acquired. I stayed at Amazon for three years—some of our team is still there, but they have all gone to work on different projects.

The integration process with Amazon was tough. Perhaps it was the transition from being a nimble startup to part of a large enterprise or other corporate culture issues, but we really struggled to get the resources we needed to be successful and launch Part Finder. The executive who was our champion within Amazon left about 9 months after we were acquired, which probably compounded the issues. Post-acquisition integration is really important for acquiring companies to get right for startup founders and their employees to have positive experiences and be successful.

From the outset, I always thought that the exit path for us would be via acquisition, given our product and strategy. However, I think we still had room to grow the company further at the point we actually sold. The biggest impediment for us was access to capital—we were having difficulty with fundraising at the time, and a lot of bias in the system contributed to that. Helping to combat these issues motivates the work I do with underrepresented founders at Collab Capital and Google for Startups. Founders should be able to pursue the pathway to exit that is right for them—whether that be an IPO or being acquired—without facing the biases and burdens that can constrain the choices available to them and their potential for success.

Ultimately, the acquisition gave me an authoritative perspective on the entire startup journey from ideation to successful exit. For the work that I do now at Google for Startups and Collab Capital, I’m able to help startups in a different way because I’ve experienced every part of the journey. That has allowed me to support startup leaders, especially by equipping founders thinking about selling their startups with the many things I did not know going into the process myself.