A Chat with Neil D’Souza, CEO at Cloud-Based Product Data Management Tool: Makersite

Makersite is transforming how products are made by accelerating the transition to a sustainable economy. We’re the leader in delivering supply chain digital twins for product sustainability, risk, and cost optimization for the world’s leading brands.

Our technology combines AI, data, and apps to power sustainable product and supply chain decisions at scale, helping manufacturing enterprises solve complex challenges in minutes where previously it would take months. We do this by empowering engineering and procurement teams in manufacturing companies with the data they need to make better decisions about what to make their products out of, and where they should buy them from.

Makersite’s AI automatically maps a company’s product data, suppliers, and manufacturing processes against more than 140 material and supply chain databases. It then constructs granular, precise digital twins of each product and how they are made, used, and disposed of.

These dynamic, multi-criteria models and deeply integrated apps enable transparency and understanding of multiple factors, including environmental footprints, should-costing, and compliance risks, faster than any current approach.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
I was the VP of product development at Thinkstep. I came to the realization that the last 10 years of my career I spent making an effort to solve enterprise product challenges in the areas of sustainability, compliance, and risk were having little impact.

A Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) for one car would take up to one year to do – too long to have an influence on product design choices. The lack of speed made the LCAs just meaningless reports without any possibility to act on the results. That’s what I wanted to solve when I founded Makersite in 2018.
 

 

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

 
It has been important to me to grow Makersite sustainably. In the last few years we have built a team of 40 employees and a customer base of around 30 enterprises like Microsoft, Vestas, Cummins and Lush. We are now at the point where demand has outpaced our delivery ability, and we need to bring that back into balance.

For this, we need more than money. These non-financial aspects were the primary driver when we recently shopped for capital. We feel proud to say that we were able to raise $18M in our first raise.
 

What can we hope to see from Makersite in the future?

 
With our recent Series A completed, we are planning to build out a world-class sales and marketing team to grow our US and European business as our primary focus, along with increasing our delivery capacities to support current and new customers. Partner integrations like the one with Autodesk will be a core technology focus for the near term.

You will see us working with integrators and value-added resellers, which will enable us to unlock further scale.
We are at the beginning of a green tech wave and sustainability is finally ‘crossing the chasm’. Looking at where industries are now there is a lot of focus on reporting. In 3-5 years’ time, no one will care about that.

Product development, procurement, and management will be measured and held accountable for the changes they are able to systematically implement to drive the transition to a sustainable economy. We are the only platform on the market that powers this transformation at scale.