Profile · Founder & CEO · Maverick
Eitan Winer
He sells the cure for the loneliest moment in ecommerce - the silent, anonymous checkout.
Eitan Winer // Co-Founder & CEO, Maverick
He sells the cure for the loneliest moment in ecommerce - the silent, anonymous checkout.
Eitan Winer runs a company built on a quietly radical trade. A merchant sits down, talks to a camera for thirty seconds, and hands the clip to Maverick. From that single take, the software generates thousands of videos, each one lip-synced and face-synced to greet a different customer by name. The brand films a moment. The customer receives a relationship.
Maverick is the San Francisco startup Winer co-founded in 2021 with engineer Debarshi Chaudhuri. Its promise is unfashionably old-fashioned dressed in very new clothes: online shopping should look and feel more like shopping in real life. The mechanism for getting there happens to be generative AI - deep-learning models that stitch a personalized greeting into a base recording and fire it off the instant a shopper buys, abandons a cart, or hits a loyalty milestone.
The early skeptics had a fair question. Isn't a synthetic video the opposite of personal? Winer's answer is that scale was always the enemy of warmth, not technology. A boutique owner can film a thank-you for ten customers. She cannot film one for ten thousand. Maverick removes the ceiling without removing her face from the frame.
The numbers gave the idea legs. By the time TechCrunch covered the company in 2022, Maverick had sent more than 200,000 personalized videos and was reporting campaign returns in the range of ten to forty dollars for every dollar a brand spent. Merchants used it for the unglamorous, high-stakes moments of ecommerce: the welcome to a first-time buyer, the nudge to a shopper who left items behind, the small surprise that turns a transaction into a habit.
What makes the bet credible is that Winer has stood on both sides of the counter. Before he sold software to online sellers, he was one - running an alpaca apparel brand on Shopify and Amazon. He knows the specific ache of watching orders arrive as nameless rows in a dashboard, and he built Maverick to close that gap for everyone stuck in the same spreadsheet.
The product also slots into the plumbing brands already use. Maverick connects to the systems where customer relationships actually live - the email and marketing platforms like Klaviyo and HubSpot, the Shopify storefronts, the automated flows that fire on a purchase or a lapse. A merchant does not have to rebuild anything. They point an existing trigger at a Maverick video and the personalization rides along on rails they already trust.
More recently the company has widened its aperture past video entirely. The same instinct - personalization that scales without losing its pulse - now drives an AI layer for email itself: generating subject lines, drafting content, running the A/B tests, and chasing the unglamorous but decisive problem of deliverability. A perfect message that lands in spam is, in Winer’s framing, no message at all.
One day, after watching Debarshi play main stage at EDC, we will go and ring the bell at the NYSE.
Winer was born and raised in La Paz, Bolivia, and the journey from there to a Stanford engineering degree is the first clue to how he operates - early comfort with crossing distances most people never attempt. At Stanford he studied Management Science & Engineering, the discipline that sits exactly where business meets systems, earning both a bachelor’s and a master’s.
His first long chapter was in mobile gaming. For roughly eight years he built products at Pocket Gems, eventually as Director of Product, learning the unforgiving feedback loop of consumer software - where retention is religion and a player who churns on day one never comes back. Games are, at their core, an engine for engagement. He would later point that same engine at shopping carts.
It was at that gaming company that he met Chaudhuri. The two spent years shipping and shelving products, which sounds like failure and is actually the most expensive education a founder can buy. They emerged with a conviction: the foundation of any durable business is the relationship with the customer, and most of ecommerce had quietly let that relationship dissolve into order numbers.
Then came the alpaca apparel. Winer ran a direct-to-consumer brand on Shopify and Amazon - a small, real, margin-anxious business - and felt the problem from the inside. Some merchants, he discovered, were already filming personalized videos for customers by hand. It worked beautifully and it did not scale even a little. That friction was the whole opportunity. In 2021 he and Chaudhuri left to build the thing that would make personalization survive contact with volume.
The investors followed the logic. In March 2022 Maverick closed a $2.7 million seed round led by Signia Venture Partners, with Global Founders Capital, Unpopular Ventures, Hack VC and angels from Salesforce, AppLovin and Benchling along for the ride. Subsequent raises brought total funding to roughly $4.1 million. The most recent capital arrived in 2024, around the time the company stretched beyond video into AI-written email - optimizing subject lines, content and the deliverability that decides whether any of it ever reaches an inbox.
A merchant records a single base video and script - roughly thirty seconds of talking to a camera. That’s the entire ask of a human.
Deep-learning models produce lip-synced and face-synced frames, weaving each customer’s name and details into thousands of unique videos.
Videos fire on the moments that matter - a purchase, an abandoned cart, a loyalty milestone - with analytics tracking engagement and revenue.
“Online shopping should look and feel more like shopping in real life.”
On the mission“We just need a voice sample, an automated notification and to know when to deploy.”
On the simplicity“After watching Debarshi play main stage at EDC, we will go ring the bell at the NYSE.”
On the dreamJoins Pocket Gems, rising to Director of Product over eight years - and meets future co-founder Debarshi Chaudhuri.
Leaves gaming, runs an alpaca apparel store, then launches Maverick to make ecommerce personal at scale.
Closes a seed round led by Signia Venture Partners; passes 200,000 personalized videos sent.
Raises further funding (total ~$4.1M) and moves into AI-driven email content and deliverability.
He plays soccer and the competitive shooter CS:GO - the reflexes of a gamer, the instincts of a product lead.
Born and raised in La Paz, one of the highest-altitude capital cities in the world.
Sold alpaca apparel online before he ever sold AI to online sellers.
His co-founder is a music-festival devotee - the company milestone they joke about is an EDC main-stage set.
Two Stanford degrees in Management Science & Engineering - business and systems, in equal measure.
Once skeptical that synthetic video could feel human, he built a company on the premise that it can.
There is a tidy irony at the center of Eitan Winer’s career. He spent years building games engineered to keep people glued to screens, and he now spends his days trying to make the coldest screen-based experience - buying something from a faceless website - feel like a conversation. The tools are deepfakes and generative models. The goal is something a 1950s shopkeeper would recognize instantly.
That tension is also the source of the company’s most interesting questions. As synthetic media gets cheaper and more convincing, the brands that win will be the ones that use it to deepen trust rather than erode it. Winer’s entire thesis is that personalization at scale is not a trick played on customers but a service rendered to them - the digital equivalent of a clerk who remembers your name.
The deepfake label, the one early coverage reached for, is worth sitting with. The word arrives loaded with fraud and political mischief, and Winer’s use of the underlying technology is almost stubbornly wholesome: a real merchant, who consented and recorded the source clip, greeting a real customer who bought something. The face is not stolen. It is multiplied. That distinction - consent and authorship versus impersonation - is likely to define which uses of synthetic media survive the coming backlash, and Maverick has planted its flag firmly on the legitimate side of it.
It helps that the company is staffed for the long argument. The team Winer and Chaudhuri assembled draws engineers and entrepreneurs from Stanford and MIT, a roster heavy on people who have shipped consumer products before and know that the hard part is never the demo. The hard part is the thousandth send, the deliverability dip, the customer who has seen the trick once and now wants something better. Building for that is a different discipline than building for a launch.
Whether Maverick becomes the category-defining business he’s aiming for is unwritten. But the shape of the ambition is clear, and he says it out loud: watch his co-founder DJ a festival main stage, then walk onto a balcony in lower Manhattan and ring a bell. A Bolivian kid, a Stanford engineer, an alpaca merchant and an AI founder - all of them betting that the future of selling online is, of all things, a familiar face.