Today marks a defining moment for Madewithinter and for the broader conversation about what AI-powered personalization can mean for the next generation of online retailers. We are thrilled to announce that Madewithinter has raised a $5 million seed round led by Video Ventures, with participation from a group of experienced angel investors who bring deep expertise in retail technology, data infrastructure, and enterprise SaaS.
This raise is not just a milestone for our company — it is a signal that the market is ready for a fundamentally different approach to e-commerce personalization, one built on real-time behavioral intelligence, first-party data, and AI models that actually learn from your customers rather than applying generic logic.
A Message from Our CEO
"We started Madewithinter because we kept seeing the same problem over and over again: mid-market retailers were drowning in customer data but starving for insight," said David Mannheim, CEO and co-founder. "The enterprise personalization tools that existed were either prohibitively expensive, required months of integration, or delivered recommendations that felt about as personal as a mass-market catalog. We knew there was a better way — one that combined the behavioral precision of real-time data with AI models sophisticated enough to act on it in milliseconds."
"This funding validates something our customers have been telling us since day one: that the personalization gap in mid-market retail is enormous, the timing for AI is finally right, and the demand for a solution that actually works — not just one that looks good in a pitch deck — has never been stronger. With this investment, we are accelerating everything: our engineering team, our enterprise go-to-market motion, and the API platform that will make Madewithinter the foundation layer for personalized retail everywhere."
Why Video Ventures Led This Round
Video Ventures has been one of the most active investors in retail technology over the past decade, backing companies at the intersection of data infrastructure and consumer experience. Their decision to lead this round was not made lightly — and their conviction speaks to a thesis they have been building for years.
"We have been watching the personalization market evolve for a long time," said Sarah Thornton, General Partner at Video Ventures. "What we kept seeing was a massive gap between enterprise-grade tools like those used by Amazon or Zalando, and what the average mid-market retailer could actually deploy. The companies in the middle — retailers doing $10M to $200M in annual revenue — were left with either expensive platforms they couldn't configure themselves, or cheap tools that barely scratched the surface of what personalization should mean."
"Madewithinter closes that gap in a way that is genuinely compelling. Their architecture — processing 200 million behavioral events per day with sub-100 millisecond recommendation latency — is technically impressive. But what really convinced us was the customer outcomes: a 35% average revenue lift across their customer base is not a marketing number. That is the result of a system that actually works at scale. We are proud to back David and the team as they build the personalization layer for the next era of retail."
The Investment Rationale: Three Forces Converging
The decision to raise now — and the decision by Video Ventures to lead — was driven by the convergence of three powerful market forces that are reshaping e-commerce personalization.
1. The Personalization Gap in Mid-Market Retail
The world's largest retailers have invested billions in personalization infrastructure. Amazon's recommendation engine alone is credited with generating an estimated 35% of its total revenue. But that technology has historically been inaccessible to mid-market players — the 50,000-plus retailers operating at meaningful scale who lack the engineering resources to build custom systems and the budget to afford enterprise contracts that start at $500,000 per year.
The result is a two-tier market. Large retailers deliver genuinely personalized experiences; mid-market retailers serve every customer the same generic homepage, the same static product listings, and the same email blasts — regardless of what those customers have browsed, searched, or purchased. The revenue opportunity lost to this gap runs into billions of dollars annually.
Madewithinter was built specifically to serve this underserved middle market. Our platform is designed to be deployed in days, not months; priced on a model that scales with your revenue, not your engineering headcount; and operated by a merchandising or marketing team without requiring a data science PhD.
2. The First-Party Data Imperative
The death of third-party cookies, the tightening of privacy regulations across the EU, UK, US, and beyond, and the growing consumer expectation of privacy have fundamentally changed the calculus of retail marketing. Retailers who relied on third-party data to power their personalization engines are facing a reckoning.
First-party data — the behavioral signals generated by your own customers on your own properties — has never been more valuable. Every page view, every search query, every product interaction, every add-to-cart event is a signal that belongs to you, complies with privacy regulations, and tells you something meaningful about buyer intent.
Madewithinter's entire platform is built on first-party data principles. We help retailers collect, structure, and activate the behavioral data their customers generate — without relying on any third-party data sources. This is not just a compliance posture; it is a competitive advantage. Retailers with rich first-party data assets will outcompete those who don't for years to come.
3. The AI Timing Inflection Point
The AI models available in 2025 are categorically different from what was available three or even two years ago. Transformer-based architectures, improved embeddings, and the maturation of real-time machine learning infrastructure have made it possible to build recommendation systems that genuinely learn from behavioral sequences, not just transaction history.
The timing matters enormously. Building an AI personalization platform two years ago would have required compromises that would have undermined the product. Building it today means we can use the best available models, the most efficient infrastructure, and the most mature tooling — and deliver outcomes that were simply not achievable before.
What We Are Building With the Capital
The $5 million in seed funding will be deployed across three strategic priorities, each of which is essential to the next phase of Madewithinter's growth.
Engineering Team Expansion
We are hiring aggressively. Over the next 12 months, we plan to grow our engineering team by 10 full-time engineers across machine learning, backend infrastructure, and frontend experience. These hires will accelerate our roadmap in several critical areas: improving the accuracy of our recommendation models, reducing latency at higher traffic volumes, expanding our integrations with major e-commerce platforms, and building the developer tooling that makes our API platform a joy to work with.
The ML engineering hires in particular will focus on advancing our next-generation recommendation architecture — a hybrid model that combines real-time session signals with long-horizon behavioral history to deliver recommendations that are both immediately relevant and strategically sound.
Enterprise Go-to-Market
Our product has proven itself with early customers who found us through word of mouth and organic channels. Now we are ready to scale that distribution with a dedicated enterprise sales and customer success motion. We are building a team of sales engineers who understand both the technical and commercial dimensions of retail personalization, and a customer success organization that will ensure our customers achieve the outcomes that justify their investment in our platform.
Our go-to-market focus will be on mid-market retailers in apparel, home goods, beauty, and sporting goods — categories where personalization has the highest impact and where the gap between current tools and what is possible is widest. We have already identified a pipeline of prospective customers in each of these verticals and expect to announce several significant partnerships in the coming months.
API Platform Development
Perhaps the most strategically important investment we are making is in our API platform. Today, Madewithinter is primarily deployed as a managed solution — we provide the algorithms, the infrastructure, and the dashboard, and our customers integrate through a JavaScript snippet and a lightweight backend connector.
The next generation of our platform will expose all of our core capabilities — behavioral event ingestion, real-time recommendation serving, A/B testing, audience segmentation, and predictive scoring — through a fully documented, developer-friendly REST API. This will allow engineering teams to build deeply custom personalization experiences on top of our infrastructure, opening up an entirely new category of customer: the technically sophisticated retailer who wants to own the experience layer but leverage our AI and data infrastructure underneath.
Our Numbers Today
We share these numbers not to boast, but because we believe transparency is essential when we are asking the market to trust us as a platform partner. As of January 2025, Madewithinter is processing 200 million behavioral events per day across our customer base. Those events — page views, clicks, searches, product interactions, cart events, and purchase completions — feed the models that power recommendations across our customers' websites, emails, and mobile apps.
The outcome of all that data and model work is measurable: our customers see an average revenue lift of 35% attributable to Madewithinter-powered personalization. That figure is calculated conservatively, based on controlled comparisons between personalized and non-personalized experiences across our customer base. It accounts for seasonality, traffic fluctuations, and product mix changes. We are proud of it — and we intend to keep improving it.
What Comes Next
The next 18 months will be defined by execution. We have a clear product roadmap, a strong team, and now the capital to pursue both aggressively. We will be sharing more about our progress — new customers, new product capabilities, new research — through this blog and through our community.
If you are a retailer curious about what Madewithinter could mean for your business, we would love to talk. Our team is available for product demonstrations, and we offer a structured pilot program that lets you see the impact of personalization on your specific customer base before making a long-term commitment.
If you are an engineer, data scientist, or product manager who wants to work on genuinely hard problems at the intersection of AI and commerce, we are hiring. Visit our careers page to see open roles, and reach out directly if none of the current listings match what you are looking for.
And if you are an investor, analyst, or journalist covering the retail technology space, we are happy to share more about our architecture, our customer outcomes, and our vision for what personalized retail looks like at scale.
We are just getting started. Thank you to Video Ventures, to our angel investors, to our early customers, and to everyone who has been part of building Madewithinter to this point. The best is ahead.