Makersite lands $18M to help companies manage product supply chains

Neil D'Souza, a software engineer by trade and previously the VP of product development at Thinkstep, realized that his ten-plus year effort to solve enterprise product challenges in the areas of compliance and risk were having little impact. The way he saw it, they took too long.

An automotive company can take an entire year to analyze a car's life cycle assessment according to D'Souza. The analysis just becomes a meaningless report if speed isn't important.

Makersite aims to produce near-instant impact assessments in the areas of compliance and risk in order to inform corporate level decisions. The aim of Makersite is to bridge the gap between experts who know what good looks like from an environmental, cost, compliance or risk perspective and decision makers with control over the product supply chain.

Makersite secured $18 million in a Series A round this week, with participation from Planet A Venture, and has over 30 customers, including Microsoft, Cummins and Vestas. D'Souza says that the first part of the funding will be used to expand the size of Makersite's team.

There are a lot of companies that specialize in cost, compliance, risk or sustainable issues. D'Souza said that the data they use is specialized to the people who work in those fields. Our solution is different due to that. The challenge of bringing multi-criteria decision analysis to non- experts is unique to us.

Makersite uses artificial intelligence to map a company's product data against a database. The idea is to help companies meet their goals while saving money.

Makersite can use the database to build a model of products and their supply chains automatically. The models cover not just what a product is made out of, but how every component or ingredient is manufactured from start to finish.

Makersite enables a customer to drop in a bill of material for a wind turbine, tell the machine that it is a wind turbine, and answer a few questions. It allows for the design of specific elements of the turbine, like the tower and nacelle, to be tailored to local resources and infrastructure, like recycling facilities, and understand trade-offs across the lifecycle and criteria.

D'Souza says that the focus will be on building out the company's sales and marketing teams to grow business in the U.S. Makersite invests capital in software to deliver cost and environmental insights within computer assisted design platforms.

The shift towards sustainable products is driven by regulation, competition, customer demand and investments. Makersite allows procurement and product design professionals to make decisions on their own.