ecommerceEvery year, brand abuse and product piracy result in losses of billions in e-commerce. The start-up Sentryc wants to change this by using AI to scan the Internet and remove plagiarism almost automatically.

The young technology company, founded in 2019 and headquartered in Berlin, offers companies a unique digital solution with its proprietary brand protection software that can be used to detect and stop product piracy and brand abuse on online marketplaces. The expert provides customers with a cloud solution that searches websites for products, identifies and documents potential counterfeits, to then report them automatically for deletion.

The fact is that online marketplaces (OMPs) and social media platforms are hubs for counterfeits, where manual monitoring is inefficient and expensive. Sentryc’s software never sleeps to help its customers gain the necessary transparency about all suspicious online offers worldwide - steadfast and effective:|

  • Constant monitoring
    Constant market observation in retail, at trade fairs, and on the internet is essential. Sentryc’s software automatically scans all relevant offers on the internet 24/7 and reveals potential violations.

  • Clarification
    The fact that products are imitated proves that they are popular, high-quality products. By means of Public Relations, you could e.g. inform customers and promote customer loyalty.

  • Quick removal
    The immediate removal of all illegal offers prevents further distribution effectively as well as additional diffusion of these products.

  • Trademark registration
    The bases for holding imitators accountable is the registration of industrial property rights -preferably worldwide. This is because you can only take action against the abuse in countries in which your trademark is registered.


In the fight against brand abuse and product piracy, there are already a few comrades-in-arms, but not enough, yet. At least, larger companies are increasingly building their own protection departments, which shows that the understanding that something needs to be done is slowly increasing.

In general, all industries are equally affected, but of course there are always new trends that mean that certain products are increasingly targeted by counterfeiters for a certain period. During the first months of the Corona crisis, for example, health and fitness products were more severely affected. Basically, everything that consumers ask a lot for, or wherever their focus of desires lies, the counterfeiters are going to strike. In the B2B sector, too, brands and companies with high-quality products and a correspondingly good reputation and high demand are quickly targeted by plagiarists who want to hop on to this success.

How Sentryc’s software is doing that? It searches for customers' brands and products on the internet. In the next step, certain attributes are “filtered out” to examine whether there are any indicators of forgery. These results are then loaded into the customer's front end and gets clearly listed there - including location, dealer, price, pictures. Then, the customer can decide with just one click which are to be taken offline and that usually happens within 24 hours.

“We fed the AI with data and trained it with certain attributes. After a few months, the algorithm is individually trained for the customer's brand and products and does not need to be triggered anymore, since the software has learned already all relevant attributes from the customer,” Hofmann explains.

Consequently, if everyone would work with the software, it could be possible to have e-commerce free from product piracy. Unfortunately, however, it is in the nature of the product pirates' business model to always come up with something new.

By MediaBUZZ