Getting design and engineering teams on the same page about what digital product to build and how to build it remains a challenge.
Many companies find themselves dealing with scattered information, often relying on shared spreadsheets to keep track of design specifications and guidelines. Design teams can use tools like Figma, while engineers manage their source code with systems like Git.
The issue becomes even more complicated for larger organizations dealing with multiple brands and different websites. Miscommunication can quickly escalate, resulting in wasted time and inefficiencies.
it is right here backpack Comes. It is a collaboration platform specially designed for enterprises that need to resolve misunderstandings between UI designers, product managers, and engineers. Knapsack creates a unified workspace that connects to tools like Figma and Git, ensuring that all design changes and code are collected, displayed, and compared in one place.
This approach ensures everything remains up to date, so branding remains consistent across all digital products. For example, if a button is supposed to be 60 pixels, this will be documented in the system, and no size errors will be made.
On Thursday, the company announced a $10 million Series A round, bringing the total raised to date to $20.8 million.
Along with the funding, Knapsack is introducing AI capabilities. It includes an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, which is Anthropic’s open source standard Designed to enhance the ability of AI models to generate more relevant responses to specific inquiries through access to company design and brand standards. The new addition, which is currently in limited beta, enables teams to use AI agents using models like ChatGPT and Gemini, while ensuring that these assistants are in line with their brand and guidelines.
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Additionally, an upcoming “ingestion engine” aims to streamline the process of creating a system of records, which is essentially a comprehensive collection of data or information for a company. Traditionally, such systems could take months to install. 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 quickly.
“We work with a very large pharmaceutical company that builds a bunch of sites associated with each of their drug brands. It used to take them about 15 months to launch a new drug asset. Now it takes two to three months using Knapsack,” CEO Chris Strahl told TechCrunch. He said the addition of the new engine will make the process even faster.
Another feature, launching later this year, helps teams rapidly explore user interfaces (UIs) and build real webpages using real code.
Launching 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, “This is an enterprise product with enterprise pricing.”
The company’s team currently has about 30 full-time employees, and has hired 14 more with the new funding.
The round was led by Builders VC with participation from Crosslink Capital, Epic Ventures, Maina Ventures and Lorimer Ventures. Previous investors include Alumni, Ascend, gradient ventures, parade ventures, founder collective, salesforce and slack fund.
Strahl said he hopes Knapsack will serve as a platform for all kinds of digital experiences in the future, especially as the power of agentic AI becomes more prevalent.
“You can imagine a future where you’re buying a shoe, and you say to a personal AI agent, ‘Hey, I really want some new shoes. I want to be able to run more often,'” Strahl told TechCrunch. “And the agent will go out and understand your preferences based on your history, and pick up a pair of shoes for you, and it will return them to whatever app your agent is running.”
“In my opinion, that experience should come from the knapsack,” he continued, “and there’s a whole world that has yet to be uncovered in how organizations think about expressing their brand through agentic apps and systems, which I want to be at the forefront of.”
This story was updated after publication.
