Sneaker aficionados invest hundreds of dollars into rare Nike Air Jordans and the hottest Kanye West Adidas Yeezys. But scoring an authentic pair amid a crush of counterfeits is no slam dunk.
Culver City, Calif., startup GOAT (a nod to the sports shorthand for greatest of all time ) operates the world's largest sneaker marketplace that uses AI to stomp out fakes. The company offers a seal of authenticity for shoes approved for sale on its site.
Counterfeit sneakers are rampant online for some of the most sought after basketball brands.
Yeezys and Jordans are now the most faked shoes in the world, and over 10 percent of all sneakers sold online are fake, said Michael Hall, director of data at GOAT.
A pair of sought-after Kanye West Adidas Yeezys or Nike Air Jordans can easily set you back more than $300.
Pop culture interest in iconic shoes developed for sports stars and celebrity rappers is fueling instant sellouts in new releases. Meanwhile, there's a heated aftermarket for the most popular footwear fashions as well as scarce vintage and retro models.
As a result, sneaker fans and novices alike are turning to a new wave of shoe sellers, such as GOAT, to ensure they're getting getting an authentic pair of the most sought-after shoes.
GOAT pioneered the ship-to-verify model in the sneaker industry. This means that sellers can list any shoes on GOAT's marketplace, but shoes that sell are first sent to the company for authentication by its image detection AI. If the shoes are found to be replicas or not as described, they don't ship and buyers are given a refund.
Founded in 2015, GOAT's business is booming. The startup, which has expanded to more than 500 employees, attracts more than 10 million users and has the largest catalog of sneakers in the world at 35,000 skus. This year, the company merged with Flight Club, a sneaker consignment store with locations in Los Angeles,New York City and Miami.
GOAT's popular app and website - some users have sold more than $10 million in sneakers - has secured nearly $100 million in venture capital funding. The company is a member of NVIDIA's Inception program, which offers technical guidance to promising AI startups.
AI to Kick Out Counterfeits
When you're offering 35,000 unique styles, tracking down counterfeit sneakers is no small challenge. GOAT has teams of sneaker experts trained in the art of spotting replicas without AI. They can spot a fake in like 10 seconds, said Emmanuelle Fuentes, lead data scientist at GOAT.
Image recognition assists GOAT's teams of authenticators and quality assurance representatives to ID and authenticate shoes in the warehouse. And the more GOAT's experts provide helpful metadata to train the AI as they work, the better it helps all those vetting sneakers.
There's a long list of data signals that are fed into a cloud instance of GPUs for the identification process and for training the network. GOAT's convolutional neural networks are trained for anomaly and fraud detection.
GOAT, which has multiple neural networks dedicated to brands of sneakers, provides proprietary tools to help its authenticators upload data to train its identification networks.
GPUs Slam Dunk
Tracking and sharing expertise on so many models of high-end sneakers requires logging a ton of photos of authentic sneakers to help assist team members in handling shoes sent in for verification.
The resolution that we are capturing things at and the scale that we are capturing the images - it's a high-resolution, massive computational challenge requiring GPUs, said Fuentes.
GOAT turned to NVIDIA TITAN Xp GPUs and NVIDIA Tesla GPUs on P2 instances of AWS running the cuDNN-accelerated PyTorch deep learning framework to initially train their neural networks on 75,000 images of authentic sneakers.
The company relies on the power of GPUs for identification of all of its sneaker models, Hall added. For some of the most-coveted sneakers, there are more inauthentic pairs than real ones out there. Previously there wasn't a way for sneakerheads to purchase with confidence, he said.
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
04/08/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
04/07/2026
April 7 2026, 19:00 (PDT) Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway Opens in...
02/06/2026
blueCORE standalone processors headline solutions designed to simplify the trans...
02/06/2026
If you've kept up with this article series, you know by now where to start w...
02/06/2026
With new DSP configurations and flexible licensing options, Calrec is removing the barriers to virtualised audio, giving broadcasters the freedom to scale produ...
02/06/2026
The TV agency was one of the earliest adopters of Nielsen's local television...
02/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
02/06/2026
Grass Valley today announced that Australian News Channel (ANC), operator of Sky News Australia, has deployed Grass Valley AMPP to transform its newsroom produc...
02/06/2026
Studio Technologies, a leading manufacturer of high-quality audio, video, and fiber-optic solutions, announces its new Model 385 Mic/Intercom Beltpack. The Mode...
02/06/2026
The Riedel Group today announced the appointment of Gudrun Scharler as CEO of Riedel Networks. She succeeds Michael Martens, who has led Riedel Networks since 2...
02/06/2026
More signals, higher quality, and outstanding ingest and streaming flexibility deliver professional results in a small, all-in-one footprint...
02/06/2026
farmerswife will be featured on the Modena Media & Entertainment stand at this year's Mediatech Africa 2026, giving visitors an opportunity to explore the l...
02/06/2026
PTZOptics will showcase a new generation of intelligent video workflows at InfoComm 2026, June 17 19, Las Vegas. Visitors to booth N8227 will see how PTZOptics ...
02/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
02/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
02/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
02/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
02/06/2026
Trust has become a commercial issue With global advertising spend forecast to exceed US$1 trillion this year*, the commercial consequences of weak governance co...
02/06/2026
June sees Ireland's cultural calendar in full bloom, as RT Supporting the Arts showcases a vibrant and wide-ranging programme spanning music, theatre, visu...
02/06/2026
After The Traitors Ireland launched in 2025, Irish audiences proved to have a taste for the global hit reality show. This Bank Holiday Monday fans can indulge e...
01/06/2026
In its sixth year, the broadcaster's coverage has become a global brand and ...
01/06/2026
Designed to solve a common problem in broadcasting, the automated workflow detects, identifies, removes, and documents copyrighted music
AudioShake has introdu...
01/06/2026
The sports-analytics company combines its data with proprietary AI to help leagu...
01/06/2026
Category line-up & sponsors announced
Photo: Paul Clarke
The Production Music Awards (PMA) have announced that submissions are now officially open ahead of...
01/06/2026
New hybrid sample/synthesis instrument revealed
Excite Audio have just released the latest instalment in their Evolve series, which has been developed in co...
01/06/2026
Latest TONEX expansion captures three rare vintage amps
The newest addition to IK Multimedia's ever-growing TONEX line-up introduces a set of three incr...
01/06/2026
Musically intelligent soft synth gets upgraded
Scaler Music will be probably be best known to many for their music theory tools, but their product range al...
01/06/2026
SBS confirms its broadcast sponsors for FIFA World Cup 2026
1 June, 2026
Media releases
SBS has secured Hyundai, Hisense, Macca's, Rexona, bet365, Com...
01/06/2026
Rohde & Schwarz Satellite Industry Days 2026 guided by the motto From Earth to ...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Marshall Electronics is showcasing a comprehensive lineup of next-generation POV cameras, purpose-built to power today's connected AV environments, at InfoC...
01/06/2026
Adobe Announces Concept to Vector
Deepa Subramaniam June 1, 2026
0 Comments
One of the biggest frustrations we hear from designers is how difficult it...
01/06/2026
Vampire Feature Night Patrol Graded with DaVinci Resolve Studio
Brie Clayton June 1, 2026
0 Comments
Colorist shapes dark, gritty tone for horror thri...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Luxembourg, June 1, 2026 - SES, a leading space solutions company, and Viva, Mexico's ultra low-cost airline, launched fast and reliable multi-orbit satelli...
01/06/2026
Agentic AI is getting physical.
At COMPUTEX on Tuesday, NVIDIA announced NVIDIA JetPack 7.2 and NVIDIA NemoClaw support on NVIDIA Jetson.
JetPack 7.2 brings a...
01/06/2026
Financial institutions have spent years building AI: fraud models, credit models...
01/06/2026
Mardi 2 juin 14h00
FilmLight (ARRI), 10 rue Ren Boulanger, 75010 Paris
Rejoignez-nous pour d couvrir comment FLAPI (l'API FilmLight) peut transformer e...
01/06/2026
January 6 2026, 05:30 (PST) Dolby Sets the New Standard for Premium Entertainment at CES 2026
Throughout the week, Dolby brings to life the latest innovatio...
31/05/2026
Olivia P rez-Collellmir to Premiere Original Work at Gaud Centennial in Barcelona The Berklee graduate and faculty member will debut her choral symphony with...
31/05/2026
Back to All News
Netflix Wins 15 Awards at the Canadian Screen Awards - See Pho...
31/05/2026
Taiwan is home to more than 500 NVIDIA ecosystem partners. More than 1 million N...
Sneaker aficionados invest hundreds of dollars into rare Nike Air Jordans and the hottest Kanye West Adidas Yeezys. But scoring an authentic pair amid a crush of counterfeits is no slam dunk.
