In 2018, Neil D'Souza, a software engineer by trade and previously vice president of product development at Thinkstep, realized that his more than ten-year effort to solve enterprise product challenges in the areas of sustainability, compliance, and risk were having little impact. The way he saw it, they took too long, which minimized his influence on product design choices.
“For example, looking at a car's life cycle assessment can easily take an auto company an entire year,” D'Souza told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Speed matters, otherwise the analysis turns into a meaningless report.”
That frustration was the genesis of his startup, makersite, which aims to produce near-instantaneous impact assessments in the areas of sustainability, compliance, and risk to inform decisions at the corporate level. Makersite, says D'Souza, is an attempt to bridge the gap between experts who know what is "good" from an environmental, cost, compliance or risk perspective and decision makers with control over the product's supply chain. .
With more than 30 clients, including Microsoft, Cummins and Vestas, and a balance sheet that shows profitable operations in recent years, Makersite is beginning to attract investor attention and this week secured $18 million in a round Serie A with the participation of Planet A Ventures. D'Souza says the tranche — the first from Makersite plus “a few convertible notes”; the company got off the ground so far, will get to work with integrators and resellers and expand the size of the Makersite team.
“There are many companies that specialize in solving cost, compliance, risk or sustainability challenges. The problem is that everyone sits in silos and the data they use is specialized for the people who work in those fields,” D'Souza said. “That's what makes our solution different. We are unique in the space in that we are the first to solve the challenge of bringing multi-criteria decision analysis to non-experts.”
Using AI, Makersite maps a company's product data against a materials and supply chain database, generating automated reports. The idea is to help companies achieve their sustainability goals while minimizing costs and keeping compliance top of mind.
The aforementioned database, which D'Souza says is among the largest of its kind, allows Makersite to identify contextual relationships to build a model of products and their supply chains automatically. The models cover not only what a product is made of, but also how each component or ingredient is made, from the mining resources to the production plant.
“[Makersite] allows a customer to enter a bill of materials for, say, a wind turbine, tell the AI it's a wind turbine, answer a few questions (for example, about power output), and the system will build automatically a 'cradle to grave model of that turbine that is located where it is manufactured and where it will be erected,” D'Souza explained. “That allows you to optimize the designs of specific turbine elements, such as the tower and nacelle, for locally available resources and infrastructure, such as recycling facilities, and understand trade-offs throughout the life cycle and criteria, such as costs. , risks and regulations. ”
As Makersite grows its headcount from around 40 employees to more than 100 over the next 12 months, D'Souza says the focus will be on developing the company's sales and marketing teams to grow the business, especially in USA and Europe. On the integration side, Makersite is investing capital in connectors for software like Autodesk to bring cost and environmental insights into computer-aided design platforms.
“There is a paradigm shift towards sustainable products driven by regulation, competition, customer demand and investment,” said D'Souza. “To do that, Makersite enables purchasing and product design professionals to make everyday decisions without the need for compliance, sustainability, cost or risk experts.”
