QUAZAR is betting that a luxury handbag’s stitching, hardware, logo placement, and even tiny surface details can become more useful than a serial-number tag. After all, that’s how experts catch fake products. The Korean startup wants shoppers, resellers, and retailers to use guided smartphone photos to identify counterfeits and eventually connect the result to a Digital Product Passport, or DPP, containing product information for regulators and supply-chain partners.
That is an ambitious pitch, but the consumer problem is real. In luxury resale, the buyer often cannot inspect an item until after money has changed hands. A counterfeit that looks convincing in listing photos can turn a supposedly smart secondhand purchase into an expensive dispute. OECD and EUIPO research estimates that global trade in counterfeit goods reached $467 billion in 2021, equal to 2.3% of world trade. It’s probably much higher now.
I met QUAZAR CEO Myunghyun Kim in person in Seoul. The practical question behind its pitch is simple: can a camera and software make authentication less dependent on shipping an item to a specialist or waiting for a human appraisal? That is a useful goal, especially for a resale market where trust is the product.
QUAZAR says its system examines visual “signature points,” including stitching, logos, hardware, patterns, and product codes, then compares them with reference data. Its public site describes this as AI-assisted: users upload images and product metadata, and the system looks for evidence that supports an authenticity decision.
The investor I saw showed a “one smartphone photo” clean demo message, but reliable product inspection often depends on image quality, angle, lighting, category, and the available reference data. In a 2025 interview with WOWTALE, Kim said guided photos were important for luxury authentication. For a real buyer, that means QUAZAR’s value will depend not only on the model’s accuracy, but also on whether the app can guide an ordinary person through taking the best input images, which makes sense.
The company’s second bet is that authentication can become the front end for product compliance. Its deck says each verified item can receive a blockchain-backed Digital Product Passport. The broader DPP idea is not speculative: the European Commission launched the EU DPP Registry in July, and DPP requirements will be introduced product by product.
There is a real compliance opportunity, but not an immediate deadline for every fashion or packaging exporter. QUAZAR will need to prove that it can meet the detailed, sector-specific requirements as they emerge.
QUAZAR says it has built a large genuine-and-counterfeit image dataset and reported 94.5% detection accuracy in testing. Its investor deck lists a Hyundai Department Store proof of concept and discussions with other retail and resale partners.
The company was founded in 2020 and began with luxury authentication before expanding its pitch toward a broader “physical intelligence” platform.
Filed in . Read more about AI (Artificial Intelligence), Incheon Startup Park, Korea, Luxury and Startups.
