Katana raises $11M series A to be the manufacturing entrepreneur’s secret weapon

We are extremely excited to announce that Katana has just raised an $11M series A investment round, which will enable us to accelerate the speed of building and delivering new features and continue improving the customer experience.

This latest investment was led by Atomico with the participation of several angel investors, and an earlier investor 42Cap, bringing the total investment raised by the company to $16M. As part of this investment, Atomico Partner Ben Blume will join the board.

Kristjan Vilosius, Katana Co-founder and CEO said, “Since 2017, we have worked with more than 1,500 manufacturers. The teams that rely on Katana span consumer and B2B industries in countries from the U.S. to New Zealand. We have been supported and taught by those customers and their feedback, allowing us to build a strong and knowledgeable team of product managers, developers, designers, and customer experience experts.

“We will use the funding to scale our team and keep developing the product to serve and delight an even larger number of manufacturers daily and continue to build Katana towards the best manufacturing software for modern manufacturing in the world.”

Ben Blume, Partner at Atomico, said, “From the first time we met Kristjan, we were incredibly impressed by the clarity of his vision to transform operations for modern manufacturers globally, and his step-by-step plan for how to achieve this. With Atomico’s roots in Skype and our four-year partnership with Pipedrive, it also means a lot to me that my first investment as a Partner at Atomico is in an Estonian company.

“Atomico has always believed in the strength of Estonian built engineering and product, and as we got to know the team at Katana, we saw a familiar pattern: a relentless product-focused team with the incredible ability to build and think from their customer’s point of view, and an unwavering belief that a new generation of manufacturers with big ideas shouldn’t have to settle for less than world-class technology to support them.”

What is next for Katana users?

Katana is on a clear path to modernize and make a world-class manufacturing ERP available to all manufacturing entrepreneurs across the globe. Katana will keep aiming to help our customers achieve productivity boost and scale their business. As mentioned before, we will use this funding to grow our team and increase the pace at which we can improve the product.

1) Product development

We are already actively working on improving the existing software and developing new and very exciting features such as barcode scanning and multi-currency. We also will continue providing compatibility with popular e-commerce sales channels and accounting tools, as well as empower manufacturers to build their own integrations with our recently released API, to make Katana a central point of their business software ecosystem.

2) Customer experience

We will increase not only product standards but also up our customer experience game. Katana’s modern, world-class UX and high-touch, individualized customer support is made for makers who are scaling fast and want to spend time helping their customers, not onboarding new software. We will keep the customer experience and software usability one of our main focuses as the product develops.

3) Scale Katana team

To achieve all the things mentioned above, we have another important task in front of us – attracting the top talent in the industry. We already have a wonderful team with strong background, and we will keep expanding it to grow our operations. We plan to double our team over the next year with just as great and driven professionals.

It would not be possible without you – our users – the backbone of Katana.

Lastly and most importantly, we want to say a huge thank you to all our customers and supporters who have been on the Katana journey for this whole time. We are extremely motivated by your feedback and the trust you have given us.

We promise to remain committed to the goal of empowering manufacturers all over the world.