About M7 Innovations
BUILT AT
THE
Intersection.
M7 Innovations is an independent Research & Development firm operating at the intersection of advanced technology, behavioral evolution, and business transformation. We were built to do the one thing agencies and consultancies both avoid: actually build the future for the brands that want to live in it.
2019
FOUNDED
36TH
MIT MEDIA LAB
PARTNER
10+
YEARS AT THE
FRONTIER
THE ORIGIN STORY
2008
The First Signal
2012
Into the Agency World
2016
The E-Trade Moment
2019
M7 Is Born
NOW
The Frontier
SHORT VERSION CARD
Matt Maher went from DI baseball to the agency world to founding one of the most credentialed independent R&D firms in the country — all because he couldn’t stop seeing what was coming next.
2008
THE FIRST Signal
Coming out of college as a DI baseball player who’d gone as far as the game would take him, Matt Maher found himself in 2008 working for an athletic training center during the depths of the recession. YouTube had just started to matter. Most people saw a video site. Matt saw a distribution channel with no one in it.
He built an original content series on baseball tips — fully organic, zero ad spend — and accumulated 8 to 10 million views. Not because he had a strategy document. Because he had a sense for where attention was going before it got there.
“I saw an opportunity. YouTube’s hot. So I started original content. Eight or ten million views later — all organic, no ads. That kind of got attention.”
That attention led to his first industry job: a role doing social for Hyundai, Kia, and a growing list of brands at Initiative. The pattern was already forming. Matt was always the person in the room who could see what the technology was about to do — and already had an idea for it.
2012
INTO THE
Agency World.
Initiative led to Stagwell, where the brief got larger. Not just cool content plays — business transformation. Matt was embedded as a cross-client innovation resource, working across E-Trade, CHANEL, Panera, Timberland, and others. Not attached to any single account. Not a traditional hire. A cost center, which in agency math is high risk and high reward.
It was at Stagwell that Matt met Nick Godfrey — and where the dynamics of the work started to clarify what M7 would eventually become. Matt wasn’t a strategist who worked in innovation. He was a practitioner who needed the agency structure less and less.
Along the way, Vine launched, and Matt built a game mechanic for Hyundai using it — stop the video at the exact frame to win a prize. Always the same instinct: find the whitespace in a new platform and do something real with it before anyone else thought to.
2016–18
THE E-Trade Moment.
Alexa had just launched. Flash briefings were consuming 75% of Amazon’s priority. And E-Trade had a dataset that Matt couldn’t stop thinking about: 90% of their revenue came from 1% of their customers — high-frequency traders who checked their portfolios 65 times a day.
He had an idea: a personalized Alexa flash briefing tied into a customer’s actual portfolio. Not a generic finance update. Your portfolio, your positions, your morning brief. He pitched it up the chain — head of media, CMO, then CEO Karl Roesner and the full C-suite.
“They loved it. And then the CEO looked at me and said: ‘Who the hell are you? Do you work for us?’ I said, I’m low level at an agency. They said: ‘Apparently we have an agency.'”
They built it. Nick and his firm came in to execute the voice build — and won a competitive review against Dentsu and every other major holding company, at a third of the price. Simultaneously, Matt was flying drones over Panera farms in Yuma, Arizona for their clean ingredients campaign. The work was getting real. The agency structure was starting to feel like a constraint rather than a platform.
2019
M7 Is Born.
The CMO of E-Trade and the head of media and CMO of Panera both got conflicted out of working with Matt at the same agency — in the same week. Separately, they each called and said the same thing: “We’re never working with your company again. But if you go solo — we’re in.”
M7 Innovations launched in late 2018, early 2019. Assembly became one of the first clients. The thesis was the opposite of full-service: go super narrow. Only AI. Only augmented and virtual reality experiential marketing. Only voice, IoT, and the evolving internet. No creative for its own sake. No media planning. No strategy decks that end up in a drawer.
The early work was idea generation: drone content for Panera, augmented reality for enterprise construction, voice assistants for home builders. Then the market shifted. Shiny marketing tactics started to lose their luster. Clients needed something deeper — strategic advisement, not just activations.
“What started as a little help with CHANEL became retained by four divisions. Two hundred people at CHANEL get my brief and my videos every single week.”
NOW
THE Frontier.
Today M7 operates as the 36th official partner of the MIT Media Lab Consortium — a global network at the absolute frontier of technology research, human-computer interaction, and innovation. Matt sits on the advisory boards of CHANEL and Glimpse Group (NASDAQ: VRAR). The Innovation Brief, now 350+ episodes strong, is distributed weekly to hundreds of Fortune 500 executives.
The firm remains intentionally small and intentionally selective. M7 works with a small number of organizations at a time — each engagement designed to go deep, not wide. Clients like Cox Automotive, Dentsu, and others don’t come to M7 for a vendor relationship. They come for what only six years at the frontier of every major technology shift can produce: genuine intelligence, applied at the exact moment it’s needed.
The name M7 stands for seven technologies Matt identified at the company’s founding as the forces reshaping every industry. All seven remain central to the firm’s work today. Not because M7 locked in early and refused to change, but because the seven were right.
HOW M7 THINKS
THE CONVEX MIRROR Principle.
Every M7 engagement is built around a single metaphor that Matt has used since the beginning: the convex mirror. A convex mirror does two things simultaneously. It shows you what’s actually behind you — your true reflection, not the one you’ve edited. And because of its curvature, it sees around corners you can’t see from where you stand.
That’s what M7 does for every client. We show brands who they really are — not who they believe themselves to be, not the brand story polished for the annual report. And we show them what’s coming around the corner before they can see it themselves.
This isn’t a framework M7 invented for a pitch deck. It’s how the firm has operated from day one with clients like CHANEL, where the relationship began small and evolved into something without precedent: a third-party firm so embedded in the organization that four divisions rely on it, and 200 people receive M7’s intelligence weekly.
We Show You Who You Actually Are
Most brands have a story they tell themselves. It’s usually optimistic, partially true, and always incomplete. M7’s first job in any engagement is to establish the honest baseline — where the organization actually stands relative to the technologies reshaping its industry, not where it wishes it stood.
We See Around the Corner You Can’t
Because M7 sits at the intersection of MIT research, AI startup product roadmaps, Fortune 500 intelligence, and live hardware testing — the signals M7 receives are genuinely ahead of what any single industry can see from inside it. The forecast isn’t opinion. It’s pattern recognition with better inputs.
Then We Build It
Agencies stop at planning. Consultancies stop at prediction. M7 stays in the room until something is built. A prototype. A deployed product. A keynote that ends with a crawl-walk-run playbook the team can execute the following Monday. The work isn’t done until there’s a real deliverable in the world.
The Result: Decisions Made From the Frontier
Clients don’t come back to M7 because the work was good. They come back because working with M7 changed how their organization thinks about technology — and because the decisions they made as a result were the right ones. CHANEL doesn’t make a major technology decision without Matt. That’s the standard M7 holds itself to.
Key Milestones
SIX YEARS.
BUILT To Last.
February 2025
36th
MIT Media Lab Official Partner
Named the 36th official partner of the MIT Media Lab Consortium — joining a global network at the absolute frontier of technology research. One of only 36 organizations selected worldwide.
2024
TOP100
Vogue Innovators of 2024
Matt Maher named to Vogue’s Top 100 Innovators of 2024 — the definitive list recognizing the individuals shaping culture, technology, and what comes next.
Ongoing
4
CHANEL Divisions
From a single client relationship to embedded advisory across four CHANEL divisions. 200+ people receive M7’s intelligence weekly. Eight-plus years and counting.
Ongoing
350+
Innovation Brief Episodes
Six years. Over 350 episodes. The M7 Innovation Brief is one of the most consistent, prolific innovation content series published by any independent firm in the world.
AR Campaign
456%
YoY Sales Growth — Bollé
The AR try-on M7 built for Bollé Nevada goggles drove 456% year-over-year sales growth on a single product. Webby Award winner. The only change in the marketing mix was M7’s work.
NFC Campaign
80K
Activations in 14 Days
M7’s NFC activation for Suffolk Construction generated 80,000 interactions in just two weeks — merging physical construction sites with digital brand experiences at unprecedented scale.
World First
1st
Haptic Shake on Snapchat
M7 and QReal developed CHANEL’s Snapchat AR experience featuring the first-ever “Haptic Shake” trigger on the platform — a genuine world first in luxury brand experience technology.
Founded
2019
M7 Innovations Launched
Two Fortune 500 CMOs called in the same week and said: if you go solo, we’re in. That was all M7 needed. The thesis: go super narrow, go super deep, and actually build the future.
The Cross-Industry Advantage
YOUR INDUSTRY ISN’T THE ONLY ONE
Moving.
Luxury
CHANEL
All about fidelity. Experience. Cultural authority. Accuracy is secondary.
Enterprise Construction
SUFFOLK
All about accuracy. Real-world precision. Fidelity is secondary.
Automotive
COX AUTOMOTIVE
Scale and ecosystem intelligence. What 250M ad dollars look like in an AI-first world.
Food & Beverage
PANERA BREAD
Content authenticity at scale. Drone production to national TV in two days.
Financial Services
E*TRADE
Personalization for high-value customers. Voice AI before the room knew what it was.
Healthcare & Research
HARVARD MEDICAL
Technology credibility in the world’s most skeptical institutions. Trust first.
“You didn’t know that what we do in QSR, enterprise construction, and sports actually helps you tremendously — because so many companies are so insular. They only read the same trades and only do the same things.”
— Matt Maher, Founder, M7 Innovations
M7 works across industries by design — not because the firm couldn’t find a niche, but because the niche is the intersection itself. The intelligence that comes from deeply understanding how augmented reality works in luxury retail informs how it works in enterprise construction. What financial services knows about AI personalization is exactly what luxury fashion needs to hear. What QSR knows about consumer behavior at scale is what every other industry is two years behind on.
M7’s clients benefit from every other M7 client. Anonymized, aggregated, and applied at the right moment — the cross-industry signal is part of what makes M7’s intelligence genuinely proprietary. No single-industry firm can offer this. No agency with a vertical specialization can replicate it. It requires actually doing the work across the board, for years, at the frontier level.
When the AR technology M7 developed for Bollé Nevada goggles drove 456% year-over-year sales growth, it wasn’t just because the AR was good. It was because M7 had seen where virtual try-on was going while the industry was still debating whether AR was a gimmick. The cross-industry lens — informed by luxury, construction, retail, and healthcare — produced the timing and the confidence to go all in.
Luxury & Fashion
Automotive
Financial Services
Food & Beverage
Enterprise Construction
Healthcare & Research
Media & Entertainment
Consumer Goods
Smart Home & Residential
Gaming & Esports
THE TEAM
SPECIALISTS
IN WHAT’S
Next.
M7 is a deliberately small team. Every person on the roster is genuinely exceptional at what they do — not a generalist with a title, but a practitioner with years of depth in their domain. The firm operates at the frontier because the people in it have spent their careers there.
★ FOUNDER
MATT MAHER
FOUNDER & PRESIDENT · FUTURIST
The futurist Fortune 500 executives call first. Matt founded M7 in 2019 after nearly a decade embedded inside the agency world’s most ambitious innovation work. Vogue Top 100 Innovators 2024. MIT Media Lab 36th official partner. Speaker at CES, SXSW, and global Fortune 500 events. CHANEL and Glimpse Group (NASDAQ: VRAR) advisor. Host of the Innovation Brief — 350+ episodes, six years running.
SUPERPOWER
Distilling the most advanced emerging technologies into intelligence that C-suite executives can act on immediately — in a keynote, a board meeting, or a one-pager.
VOGUE TOP 100 — 2024
MIT MEDIA LAB
CHANEL ADVISORY
GLIMPSE GROUP ADVISOR
WEBBY AWARD
OPERATIONS
JESS MERRELL
CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER
Jess runs M7’s operations across every client engagement — the connective tissue that turns frontier-level ambition into delivered work. She manages the full client lifecycle from brief to launch, ensures quality across all deliverables, and holds the infrastructure that allows the rest of the team to operate at the edge.
SUPERPOWER
Harnessing the universe to make M7 successful. And running operations.
CLIENT LEADERSHIP
NICK GODFREY
CHIEF CLIENT OFFICER
Nick has worked with 27 of the Fortune 100 — a number that shapes everything about how he stewards client relationships and growth strategy at M7. He is the senior lead on all major client partnerships, ensuring that each engagement is built on genuine trust and delivers outcomes that organizations measure in quarters, not sprints.
SUPERPOWER
Having worked with 27 of the Fortune 100, Nick is the top dog for the top dogs.
PRODUCT & PLATFORM
ALEYNA GROSS
GENZ WHISPERER · PLATFORM LEAD
Aleyna builds things from scratch — platforms, apps, CRM databases, activation tools — with a native fluency in the habits and behaviors of the next generation of consumers that no amount of research can replicate. She is also beginning to develop her own thought leadership practice, bringing a genuinely different generational lens to the same frontier technologies M7 has always covered.
SUPERPOWER
Can build anything from scratch using grit and entrepreneurial magic — and understands the humans who will actually use it.
WEB3 & EMERGING
TERRY WELDON
WEB3 WARLOCK
Terry is M7’s deep practitioner in blockchain, NFTs, decentralized experiences, and the evolving architecture of the internet. He mints, prints, and hints toward a future he knows is coming — not as a theorist, but as someone who has built extensively in the space and can distinguish genuine signal from the considerable noise that surrounds Web3.
SUPERPOWER
He mints, prints, and hints towards the future he knows is coming. M7’s secret Web3 weapon.
STRATEGY
EIMEAR TYRRELL
SENIOR STRATEGIST
Eimear sits at the bridge between research, insight, and creative strategy — turning the emerging technology signals M7 tracks into coherent narratives and effective market positioning. She uncovers the deeper strategic vision behind every client tension, ensuring that M7’s intelligence doesn’t just inform decisions but shapes the way clients think about their category.
SUPERPOWER
Uncovering the insight and deeper strategic vision behind every client tension — then making it actionable.
Note on team growth: M7 engages a network of specialists — producers, technologists, hardware experts, and domain practitioners — on a per-project basis. The core team listed here leads every engagement. Work is never handed off to junior resources without senior oversight. When you work with M7, you work with the people on this page.
AS FEATURED IN
- FORBES
- BARRON’S
- VOGUE
- ADWEEK
- DIGIDAY
- QUARTZ
- MEN’S JOURNAL
- EMARKETER
- GLOSSY
- RETAIL TOUCHPOINTS
- STREET FIGHT
- YAHOO FINANCE
Work With M7
YOU’VE READ THE STORY.
Now Build Yours.
Every M7 engagement starts the same way: a 30-minute conversation with no agenda except understanding your situation. If M7 is the right fit, you’ll know it by the end of the call. If it’s not, we’ll tell you that too.
Portfolio
SEE THE Work.
Case studies, results, and real builds for the world’s most iconic brands.
Speaking
BOOK Matt.
CES. SXSW. MIT. Fortune 500 offsites. Custom keynotes from $5,000.
Free · Every Thursday
THE Brief.
350+ episodes. The fastest way to experience M7’s intelligence for free.
Personal Brand
MATTMAHER.host
Matt’s personal site — speaker bio, sizzle reel, and speaking inquiries.