The Tamesis
Buying what we see on our TV screens has long been an industry pipe dream—a great idea in theory but difficult to execute.
Now, two former Google executives think they’ve cracked the puzzle. Josh Lanzet has worked at Google for 13 years, leading streaming media and entertainment partnerships; Jason Fahlstrom has worked on the technology company’s AI strategy for 11 years. They’ve spent the past two years leveraging the latest AI and computer vision technology to create Silvr, and they hope the startup can bring us the shopping TV dream with an app launching on February 24th. Angel investors from Netflix, Disney, Google and LinkedIn backed the startup in a family and friends round last year. In March, the founders are now preparing to raise $3 million in pre-seed investment.
Silvr’s consumer-facing app allows viewers to point their camera at a TV or laptop screen to instantly identify and purchase the exact item a character is wearing. They are also building a white-label B2B platform to provide instant commerce for streamers like Netflix and HBO Max so viewers can pause and click on the screen to shop.
“For a long time, the ‘Where did you get that?’ question has been a visual question answered with a text-based answer, but now our consumer applications match it with a visual answer,” said Lanzet. “There’s object recognition, but there’s no fashion recognition, and that’s what Silvr brings.”
Fashion brands and streamers are taking notice. Silvr has partnered with more than 300 fashion brands prior to launch, including Alexander McQueen, Isabel Marant, Etro, Alo Yoga, Nike, New Balance and Ganni. It also owns major retailers like Nordstrom, Macy’s and Amazon, resale and vintage platforms like The RealReal and 1stDibs, and partners with Impact.com, CJ and Rakuten, the affiliate networks behind e-commerce attribution. Lanzet and Fahlstrom also said they are in “active discussions” with all major streaming platforms about their B2B offering, and one of them has already signed a letter of intent.
The founders say the launch coincides with rapid advances in artificial intelligence and computer vision, growing consumer readiness for shopping entertainment like in-person shopping, and the accelerating adoption of visual search. AI models have rapidly evolved over the past two years so that they can interpret visual context more accurately, and so-called “multimodal” searches are now possible through major AI chat platforms like OpenAI, as well as Google Lens and Pinterest Lens – technically speaking, viewers can already point their cameras at the screen and use these features to identify products in movies.
