Getting design and engineering teams on the same page about what digital product to create and how to build it continues to be a challenge.
A lot of companies find themselves dealing with scattered information, often depending on shared spreadsheets to keep track of design specs and guidelines. Design teams might use tools like Figma, while engineers manage their source code with systems like Git.
This issue becomes even trickier for large organizations juggling multiple brands and various websites. Miscommunication can pile up quickly, resulting in wasted time and inefficiency.
That’s where Knapsack comes in. It’s a collaboration platform specifically designed for enterprises that need to resolve misunderstandings between UI designers, product managers, and engineers. Knapsack creates a unified workspace that connects with tools like Figma and Git, ensuring that all design changes and code are collected, showcased, and compared in one place.
This approach makes sure that everything remains up to date, so branding stays consistent across all digital products. For example, if the button is supposed to be 60 pixels, this will be documented in the system, and no sizing mistakes are made.
On Thursday, the company announced a $10 million Series A round, bringing the total raised to date to $20.8 million.
Alongside the funding, Knapsack is introducing AI capabilities. This includes an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, which is Anthropic’s open source standard that is designed to enhance AI models’ ability to generate more relevant responses to specific inquiries by having access to a company’s design and brand standards. The new addition, currently in limited beta, enables teams to use AI agents using models like ChatGPT and Gemini while ensuring these assistants are consistent with their brand and guidelines.
Additionally, an upcoming “ingestion engine” aims to streamline the process of creating a system of record, which is essentially a comprehensive collection of data or information for a company. Traditionally, setting up such systems can take months. Knapsack believes the new engine will reduce that time to just a few days, making it easier for new teams or projects to get up and running more quickly.
“We work with a very large pharmaceutical company that creates a bunch of sites associated with each of their drug brands. It used to take them about 15 months to launch a new drug property. Now using Knapsack, it takes between two and three months,” CEO Chris Strahl told TechCrunch. He noted that adding the new engine is poised to make this process even faster.
Another feature, launching later this year, helps teams quickly explore user interfaces (UIs) and generate real webpages using real code.
Launched in 2022, Knapsack says it serves dozens of Fortune 1000 companies but did not disclose their names. Strahl declined to share subscription pricing details, saying only, “it’s an enterprise product with enterprise pricing.”
The company currently has nearly 30 full-time employees on the team, and just hired 14 more with the new funding.
The round was led by Builders VC with participation from Crosslink Capital, Epic Ventures, Mana Ventures, and Lorimer Ventures. Past investors include Alumni, Ascend, Gradient Ventures, Parade Ventures, Founder Collective, Salesforce, and Slack Fund.
Strahl said he hoped Knapsack would serve as a platform for all kinds of digital experiences in the future, particularly as the power of agentic AI becomes more prevalent.
“You can envision a future where you’re buying a shoe, and you say to a personal AI agent, ‘Hey, I’d really like some new shoes. I want to be able to go running more frequently,’” Strahl told TechCrunch. “And the agent would go out and understand your preferences based on your history, and take you a pair of shoes, and it would return that into whatever app is running your agent.”
“In my opinion, that experience should come from Knapsack,” he continued, “and there is this entire world that has yet to be unveiled of how organizations think about expressing their brand through agentic apps and systems that I want to be at the forefront.”
This story was updated after publication.
