Knapsack receives $10 million to help bridge the gap between design and engineering teams

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 disparate information, often relying on shared spreadsheets to keep track of design specifications and guidelines. Design teams may use tools like Figma, while engineers manage their source code using systems like Git.

This problem becomes more difficult for large organizations that deal with multiple brands and different websites. Misunderstandings can accumulate quickly, leading to wasted time and inefficiency.

This is the place luggage It is a collaboration platform designed specifically for organizations 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 and code changes are collected, viewed, and compared in one place.

This approach ensures that everything stays up-to-date, so that the branding remains consistent across all digital products. For example, if the button size 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 funding round, bringing the total amount raised so far to $20.8 million.

Besides financing, Knapsack offers AI capabilities. This includes the MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, an open source Anthropic standard It is designed to enhance the ability of AI models to generate more relevant responses to specific queries by accessing a company’s design and branding criteria. The new addition, which is currently in limited beta, allows teams to use AI agents using models like ChatGPT and Gemini while ensuring these assistants align with their brand and guidelines.

Additionally, the upcoming Input Engine aims to simplify the process of creating a system of record, which is essentially a comprehensive set of data or information for a company. Traditionally, such systems could take months to create. Knapsack believes the new engine will reduce this 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 set of sites associated with each of their drug brands. It used to take about 15 months to launch a new drug. Now with Knapsack, it takes two to three months,” CEO Chris Strahl told TechCrunch. He pointed out that adding the new engine would make this process faster.

Another feature, launching later this year, helps teams quickly explore user interfaces (UIs) and build real web pages using real code.

Launched in 2022, Knapsack says it serves dozens of Fortune 1000 companies but did not reveal their names. Strahl declined to share subscription pricing details, saying only: “It’s an enterprise product at an enterprise price.”

The company currently has approximately 30 full-time employees on the team, and has 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. 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 artificial intelligence becomes more widespread.

“You can imagine a future where you buy a shoe, and you say to your personal AI agent, ‘Hey, I would really like some new shoes,’” Strahl told TechCrunch. I want to be able to run more frequently.’ “And the agent will come out and understand your preferences based on your history, take a pair of shoes, and put them back into whatever app your agent is running.”

He continued, “In my opinion, that experience has to come from Knapsack, and there’s this whole world that’s yet to be uncovered about how organizations think about expressing their brand through applications and agent systems that I want to be at the forefront of.”

This story was updated after publication.