Katana raises $35M to scale software manufacturers love as much as their products

Exciting times ahead for the Katana team! After closing a $35 million Series B round, bringing the total funds raised to date to $51 million, our team has the support to scale up Katana’s features for small to medium-sized manufacturers.

January 19, 2024

6 min read

James Humphreys

Head of Content Marketing

The rise in direct-to-consumer manufacturing brought a wealth of creativity and options for consumers. Yet manufacturing software to support these new brands has yet to catch up with today’s usability standards, and do not cater to the needs of modern SMBs.

With the support of new investors Northzone and Lightrock, as well as previous investors Atomico and 42CAP, Katana secured funding to further expand its industry-leading manufacturing ecosystem for SMBs.

I am thrilled to welcome investors to our board who share our team’s vision. We’re equally grateful for the continued support of our previous investors and angel investors.

— Kristjan Vilosius, Founder & CEO of Katana

From day one, Katana focused on an integration-led approach to production scheduling software. This plug-and-play strategy gives manufacturers an ecosystem of tools and features as opposed to the traditionally siloed, monolithic enterprise solution that also comes with a price tag most SMBs cannot afford. By bringing manufacturing software into the digital era and matching the standards of consumer technology and other SaaS verticals, Katana is already named an industry leader in the inventory management and manufacturing software space by Gartner and is consistently top-ranked in support and ease of use by customers.

Introducing our new Series B investors, Northzone and Lightrock

The investment round was led by global VC firm Northzone, bringing in a wealth of experience and knowledge as an early investor in Spotify, Personio, and Trustpilot. In 2022, Northzone announced their tenth fundraise of €1B to invest from seed to pre-IPO startups. Founded in 1996, Northzone is one of the most experienced venture capital funds in Europe, with offices in London, New York, Stockholm, Amsterdam and Oslo. We’re also excited to have Michiel Kotting, a Northzone Partner, joining Katana’s board.

We’ve been deeply impressed with Kristjan and the team, who combine strong product skills, essential to building something as complicated and powerful as a basic ERP system, with commercial savviness and drive. We believe this unlocks the next category in modern-day, modular, user-friendly software, and has the potential to be a defining business in that category.

— Michiel Kotting, Partner at Northzone & Katana Supervisory Board Member

Lightrock also participated in the round, an impact-driven growth investor that supports companies pursuing scalable and tech-driven business models. Lightrock’s portfolio includes more than 80 high-growth companies worldwide, developing tech for good.

ERP software solution providers have historically underserved the SMB manufacturing market despite it forming approximately 98% of the US manufacturing sector. Undoubtedly, this deficiency of specialist providers has hindered the ability of countless SMBs to effectively compete with bigger incumbent manufacturers.

— Christopher Steinau, Partner at Lightrock

Alongside Northzone and Lightrock, Katana has the continued support of previous investors Atomico and 42CAP during this funding round. Angel investors also offer ongoing guidance, including Sergei Anikin (former CTO at Pipedrive, also serving as Katana’s Chairman of the Supervisory Board), Sten Tamkivi (CPO of Topia, and former Skype executive), and Ott Kaukver (CTO of Checkout and former CTO of Twilio).

Scaling Katana as a product, brand, and global team

Since we closed Series A funding in 2021, Katana launched an open API, app marketplace, and over 60 integrations and feature releases, laying the foundation for the next stage of Katana’s evolution as a product. We also developed a new brand in line with our vision for software that is equal parts powerful and easy to use.

With Series B funding secured, our team will introduce more advanced accounting integrations and world-class software services to an increasingly extensive app marketplace. Katana’s product roadmap also includes built-in insights and reporting, and an extended data model for customizable fields to expand workflow possibilities. Keep an eye on our product updates for the latest product developments and feature releases.

To support these plans, our team is also growing! We’ve already grown from a team of 30 to over 140 worldwide since the close of Series A. Introducing new product development teams will amp up feature releases, and expanding customer support teams globally will ensure that stellar customer satisfaction continues to set us apart. See all open positions here, as well as what it’s like to work at Katana.