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§ Private Profile · San Francisco, CA, USA
MakerSights is a technology company.
MakerSights provides a product intelligence platform enabling retail brands to make informed decisions through consumer insights. It leverages AI-powered research to validate entire product lines, integrating expert guidance with an always-on engine for continuous feedback. This approach transforms consumer behaviors into actionable data, allowing brands to test their full assortment, moving beyond partial product validation.
Dan Leahy and Matt Field co-founded MakerSights in 2015. Their insight recognized retail brands needed a more data-driven strategy to understand consumer demand across complete product offerings. They sought to eliminate guesswork in product development, particularly within apparel, footwear, and accessories, by embedding direct consumer feedback.
The company serves leading global retail brands, specializing in apparel, footwear, and accessories. MakerSights’ mission is to empower clients to develop consumer-centric products by integrating continuous feedback throughout the product lifecycle. Its vision makes consumers an indispensable part of the product journey, ensuring decisions are informed by comprehensive insights for market success.
MakerSights has raised $37.1M across 3 funding rounds.
MakerSights has raised $37.1M in total across 3 funding rounds.
MakerSights has raised $37.1M across 3 funding rounds. Most recently, it raised $25.0M Series B in August 2021.
MakerSights is a San Francisco-based technology company founded in 2015 that provides an AI-powered research platform delivering product and assortment insights to apparel, footwear, and accessory brands.[1][2][4][5] It serves product teams, merchants, designers, and sales teams by converting consumer needs and behaviors into actionable insights for product development, assortment planning, pricing, and innovation, helping brands align calendars with preferences, reduce waste, and improve profitability.[2][4][5] With 51-200 employees and revenue between $10M-$50M, MakerSights raised $25M in a Series B round in August 2021 led by G2 Venture Partners, marking its latest funding across five rounds.[1]
The platform's core offering, MakerLabs, uses Digital Twins—AI models trained on millions of real consumer responses—to enable rapid testing of product ideas, delivering sentiment scores, performance rankings, and qualitative feedback in under an hour, bypassing traditional survey delays.[3]
MakerSights was founded in 2015 in San Francisco with a vision to reduce the distance between creatives and consumers in retail, addressing the need for faster, consumer-centric decision-making in apparel, footwear, and accessories.[2][3][5] The founders, drawing from deep industry expertise, emerged from recognizing gaps in traditional research—long timelines, high costs, and limited scalability—aiming to rebuild the connection between brands and consumers for a more sustainable industry by minimizing excess inventory.[3][4][5]
Early traction built through partnerships like the 2024 integration with PTC's FlexPLM system, allowing designers to incorporate consumer feedback pre-production, and consistent funding culminating in the $25M Series B in 2021, fueling platform evolution into AI-driven tools like MakerLabs after a decade of learnings.[1][3]
MakerSights rides the wave of AI-driven consumer research and sustainable retail, enabling brands to conduct iterative, cost-efficient testing amid shifting preferences and supply chain pressures.[2][3] Timing aligns with post-pandemic demands for agility—faster GTM, reduced overproduction—and rising e-commerce data needs, where traditional methods lag.[1][4] Market forces like inventory waste (exacerbated by trends) favor its model, influencing the ecosystem by empowering 51-200 employee scale to serve major brands, fostering data-backed innovation over intuition.[1][5]
As a Challenger in automated focus groups, it competes with UserTesting and EDITED, pushing the sector toward AI-simulated insights for fashion/retail analytics.[2]
MakerSights is poised to expand MakerLabs' AI capabilities, potentially deepening integrations and scaling Digital Twins with fresher consumer data amid AI retail booms.[3] Trends like generative AI for personalization and sustainability mandates will shape its path, amplifying influence as brands prioritize waste reduction and real-time feedback.[4][5] Evolving from research partner to indispensable platform, it could redefine assortment planning, tying back to its founding mission of consumer-creative alignment for efficient, demand-led retail.
MakerSights has raised $37.1M in total across 3 funding rounds.
MakerSights's investors include Zach Barasz, Austin Ventures, Baseline Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, First Round Capital, Forerunner Ventures, G2VP, Grishin Robotics, Brendan O'Driscoll, Marc Baghadjian, Brant Barton, Brett Hurt.