MakerSights, a software platform putting the consumer at the centre of retail’s assortment creation process, has secured USD25 million ins Series B funding round led by new investors G2 Venture Partners.
The new round follows the company’s GBP8.5 million Series A led by Forerunner Ventures in 2019 and GBP3.1 million in seed funding led by Baseline Ventures in 2017, bringing the company’s funding to a total of GBP37 million over the past five years.
New funding will allow MakerSights to directly integrate its consumer analytics capabilities into the workflows of its brand partners, increasing the frequency and ease of consumer-informed decisions. In addition, the round will support key executive hires and global expansion across the company’s current Vancouver, San Francisco, Austin and London locations.
Joining G2VP in the round are new investors Golub Capital and Gaingels, joining existing investors Forerunner Ventures and Baseline Ventures and a number of prominent retail technology executives, including Brett Hurt and Brant Barton, the founders of BazaarVoice, Jared Schrieber and Jon Brelig, the founders of InfoScout, and Elizabeth Spaulding, the CEO of Stitch Fix.
“Every year nearly 40 per cent of products that are produced fail to sell, resulting in hundreds of billions dollars in missed sales and a staggering environmental footprint for retail, an industry now responsible for nearly 10 per cent of global CO2 emissions,” says Dan Leahy, CEO of MakerSights. “We believe that addressing the traditionally siloed and opinion-driven process for bringing assortments to market is the biggest opportunity for brands to reduce their waste. At MakerSights, we’ve spent the past six years collaborating with leading brands to evolve this process through streamlined workflows that drive consumer-informed decisions. Our brands have proven it’s possible to deliver assortments with higher profits and less waste. With the addition of G2 Venture Partners’ expertise in harnessing efficient business processes to deliver more sustainable outcomes, we’re eager to usher in a less wasteful era of retail.”
G2 Venture Partners is a venture and growth investing firm focused on emerging technologies driving sustainable transformation across traditional industries. They serve as the main venture partner for many companies committed to a more sustainable future including Arcadia, Carbon, Kespry, Seegrid, Sheertex and Shift. G2VP’s investing partners have also backed major brands such as Turo and Uber.
“We’re committed to backing entrepreneurs who are creating new avenues to support environmentally responsible economic growth, and MakerSights is providing a technology solution that takes a modern approach to solving the decades long waste problem in retail,” says Zach Barasz, partner at G2 Venture Partners. “Retail needs to embrace new ways of working, and we believe MakerSights brings a transformative, yet scalable solution to brands across the retail ecosystem. Their proven approach of harnessing market demand signals to better inform large material and financial investments presents a clear path to dramatically reducing waste for this industry.”
The platform is enabling brands to become dramatically more responsive to market opportunities by scalably delivering predictive insights into the seasonal process of assortment creation and delivery. Teams across design, product, merchandising and go-to-market are moving faster to identify assortment risks and drive toward consumer-right solutions. With a more informed and efficient process, brands including HOKA ONE ONE, Bonobos, Champion and Madewell are improving assortment profitability while cutting sample and inventory waste.
