A specialty online marketplace with aims to be the "Amazon for Vegans" is now open for business.

The vegan shopping platform, Billion Vegans, focuses on quality and verification for the products they sell on-site. All 4,500-plus items have been vetted by the website's team to be 100 percent vegan, something co-founder Alon Hochberg felt was missing from giants like Amazon. He got the idea for Billion Vegans after a pair of vegan shoes he ordered off of Amazon were found to use a glue made from pigs' bones, so this verification step is huge for his business model.

So far, Billion Vegans has 4,500 products from 200 sellers, including big names like Daiya (vegan cheese) and Silk (soy milk). They currently only ship to the United States, but hope to expand both their offerings and distribution rapidly as time goes on.

Can a company like this eventually become the 'Amazon for Vegans'? It's definitely possible, given the right amount of growth, size, and efficiency of the verification process takes. However, there's also always the possibility that Amazon incorporates their own certification program, or even acquires somebody like Billion Vegans in the future to onboard that vetting into their own products.

Regardless of what happens, Billion Vegans adds more accountability and transparency to the vegan marketplace that others will soon have to be responsible for as well.

Billion Vegans is currently running a crowdfunding equity campaign on WeFunder to raise more capital to continue its growth.