You’re on the hunt for a sleek, navy-blue, athletic jacket—perhaps for a cold weather pickleball match at your firm’s offsite. Excited to find the perfect fit, you start searching on your favorite brands’ websites. You are greeted with pages of results — some items mildly catch your eye while others appear totally irrelevant with the wrong color, fit and style. After an hour of mind-numbing scrolling, you abandon the search. This experience is all too common and is costing brands tens of millions in lost revenue.
At Sapphire, we believe having a best-in-class search and personalized shopping experience that best captures shopper intent is necessary in today’s hyper-competitive ecommerce environment. That’s why we’re thrilled to partner with Founder and CEO Eli Finkelshteyn and the entire team at Constructor to lead their $25M Series B. Constructor is an AI-powered product search and discovery platform that has delivered best-in-class shopper conversion and ROI for enterprise brands and retailers.
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Pressing and Costly Need for Next-Gen Search
In today’s fiercely competitive ecommerce market, tens of millions of brands are vying for online shoppers’ attention. A powerful search experience is crucial for driving shopper conversion and revenue as 69% of online shoppers today go straight to the search bar, yet 80% of those leave due to poor experience. Furthermore, most search engines in the market today are built on outdated, keyword-based technology that often delivers sub-optimal, irrelevant results. A cumbersome user experience is all too common today and often leads to countless missed sales opportunities. We believe poor search and discovery have been the industry standard for too long and ecommerce businesses are overdue for a game-changing solution.
Constructor: Best-in-Class, AI-First Search and Personalization
Constructor is revolutionizing the ecommerce search and personalization experience for enterprise brands and retailers. At the heart of Constructor’s innovation lies its proprietary AI engine – Native Commerce Core – that leverages advanced algorithms, transformers and LLMs to decode complex patterns and understand user intent. By analyzing historical and real-time behavioral patterns such as clickstreams and purchase history, Constructor delivers hyper-personalized search results and product discovery in real time for shoppers.It also provides an intuitive interface for merchandising teams to fine-tune search outcomes and align results with business objectives like promotions and inventory management. Beyond search, browse and recommendations, Constructor offers modules such as collections, attribute enrichment and an AI Shopping Assistant. This comprehensive suite of AI-powered tools combines best-in-class, search and discovery capabilities with a flexible interface, delivering unmatched ROI for brands like as Target, Sephora, Bonobos, Petco, Under Armour, and many more.
Experienced Team Dedicated to Innovation
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We are thrilled to be partnering with Eli and the Constructor team. Eli and his team bring over a decade and a half of experience in machine learning, natural language processing, and linguistics. They saw the limitations and challenges of existing ecommerce search solutions firsthand and developed a revolutionary product that has been a needle mover for enterprises.
At Sapphire Ventures, we are proud to invest in companies we believe to be of real consequence. We have a long history of partnering with category-leading companies in ecommerce enablement, including the likes of Attentive, Braze, Contentful, Gorgias and Qubit (Acquired by Coveo). Constructor is building a transformative piece of the ecommerce tech stack, and we are honored to be onboard to support the next chapter of their growth. If you’re interested in learning more about Constructor’s products, you can find more information here. If you’re interested in joining their growing team, check out their openings here.
Legal disclaimer
Nothing presented within this article is intended to constitute investment advice, and under no circumstances should any information provided herein be used or considered as an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy an interest in any investment fund managed by Sapphire Ventures (“Sapphire”). Information provided reflects Sapphires’ views as of a time, whereby such views are subject to change at any point and Sapphire shall not be obligated to provide notice of any change. Companies mentioned in this article are a representative sample of portfolio companies in which Sapphire has invested in which the author believes such companies fit the objective criteria stated in commentary, which do not reflect all investments made by Sapphire. A complete alphabetical list of Sapphire’s investments made by Its direct growth and sports investing strategies is available here. No assumptions should be made that investments described were or will be profitable. Due to various risks and uncertainties, actual events, results or the actual experience may differ materially from those reflected or contemplated in these statements. Nothing contained in this article may be relied upon as a guarantee or assurance as to the future success of any particular company. Past performance is not indicative of future results.
