Estonia-based Katana, which offers ERP software with prebuilt integrations to SMB manufacturers, raised a €35M Series B, bringing its total funding to ~$50M
Paul Sawers / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
Katana's €35M Series B more than triples its balance sheet from the $11M Series A led by Atomico in early 2021, taking total funding to roughly $50M. The thesis is vertical ERP: prebuilt integrations sold to SMB manufacturers too small for legacy enterprise suites.
The round lands mid-wave. Xentral pulled a $75M Series B for online-SMB ERP months earlier, and Torii raised $50M for SaaS management the same season — growth investors were paying up for back-office software aimed at companies the big suites treat as an afterthought.
First-order effects
- SMB manufacturers gain a better-capitalized specialist whose pitch is prebuilt integrations instead of costly custom implementation, while Katana gets runway to widen its integration catalog and go-to-market.
Second-order effects
- Horizontal ERP incumbents and fellow SMB-focused players like Xentral now fight for the same back-office budget, pushing pricing toward simple subscriptions and fast deployment.
- Factory-floor automation plays like Daedalus make live production data more valuable, raising the stakes for whoever owns the manufacturer's system of record.
Third-order effects
- If vertical point solutions keep raising at this cadence, ERP structurally fragments into vertical clouds — setting up eventual consolidation as incumbent suites acquire specialists rather than rebuild for each industry.
The trend: ERP is splintering into vertical-specific cloud products for SMBs, with the 2021–22 growth-capital wave determining which specialists scale and which become acquisition targets.