German AI startup Makersite raises €60 million to accelerate product sustainability in the design process

Stuttgart-based Makersite has secured €60 million in Series B funding to enhance its customer offering and scale both its technology and team to help manufacturers make informed and sustainable decisions throughout the product design process.

The round was co-led by Lightrock and Partech, and joined by SE Ventures. All of Makersite’s Series A investors – including Hitachi Ventures, KOMPAS VC, Translink Capital, and Planet A – participated in the round.

“This investment marks a critical milestone in our mission to make sustainable product design the default,” said Neil D’Souza, CEO and Founder of Makersite. “Securing this level of commitment – especially in today’s uncertain economic and geopolitical environment – demonstrates the strength of our business case and the urgency of our mission. The funding will allow us to accelerate platform development, deepen integration with our technology partners, and scale our impact globally.”

Founded in 2018, Makersite’s AI-powered platform helps manufacturers gain a deeper understanding of what is in their supply chains, starting with fixing product data. The platform takes fragmented and inconsistent customer data and uses AI to clean, connect, and structure it. This enriched data is then combined with Makersite’s proprietary data foundation which includes details on how materials and components are made, their cost, environmental footprint, regulatory status, and more.

Makersite uses artificial intelligence and graph technology to build digital twins of manufactured products. This approach enables teams to measure impacts and collaboratively identify optimal mitigation strategies and new sourcing opportunities in real-time and make better products, faster.

The platform also supports performance reporting, helping customers communicate key metrics – such as cost, carbon emissions, product compliance, and risk – to internal stakeholders, customers, and regulators.

Schneider Electric’s Chief Digital Officer, Peter Weckesser, adds: “partnering with Makersite gives our teams and customers unparalleled insight into the environmental impact of products, accelerating our journey toward net-zero and setting new benchmarks for resilience and innovation.”

Makersite, with its team of over 150 ‘Makernauts’, enables manufacturers – including Microsoft, Daikin, Cummins, Barco, and Schneider Electric – to design safer, more sustainable, and compliant products.

The platform integrates with leading product lifecycle management (PLM) systems, like Siemens’ Teamcenter software and PTC Windchill, and CAD tools, such as Ansys and Autodesk, already used by manufacturers.

“Our commitment to Makersite reflects our strong confidence in their vision and their unique approach – treating sustainability as a balanced trade-off between cost, safety, and environmental performance, rather than simply a ‘green’ checkbox,” commented Chris Steinau, Partner at Lightrock. “Makersite’s outstanding technology and clear market traction position them as a future leader in helping manufacturers navigate today’s complex challenges and deliver real, measurable impact.”

For larger enterprises, the reduction in complexity and increase in agility is the main aim, while for small businesses, the search for cost effective solutions is the main driving force.

The platform’s impact is observable:

• Microsoft has reduced the carbon footprint of its Surface Pro 10 laptop by up to 28% in just two years.
• Schneider Electric will use Makersite to scale EPD and eco-design across a portfolio of more than 200,000 stock keeping units (SKUs).

“We are very honoured and proud to invest in this global impact champion. We have very strong convictions on Makersite’s product superiority, the depth of its market where R&D and complex purchasing can be transformed through accelerated insight generation and the exceptional talent of Neil and his team,” commented Arnaud Minvielle and Remi Said, General Partners at Partech. “We believe that we can support Makersite in its next S-curve, alongside Lightrock and other shareholders.”

The need for solutions like those offered by Makersite is being driven by an increasingly competitive manufacturing sector and mounting pressure on corporates to address their greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). Manufacturing alone is responsible for approximately 19% of global emissions, highlighting the scale of the challenge facing the industry.

As regulatory and stakeholder expectations intensify, manufacturers are seeking ways to meet new standards while also re-evaluating and restructuring their supply networks to enhance resilience and reduce supply chain risk.

“We were impressed by the Makersite team’s expertise in lifecycle and supply chain intelligence,” said Julien Cristiani, General Partner at SE Ventures. “Their domain knowledge, combined with a clear execution track record, stood out immediately. What sealed our conviction was the company’s growth and the level of automation they’ve achieved – being able to process thousands of SKUs with such speed and precision is a game-changer for supply chain visibility and sustainable product development at scale.”

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