Ex-Shark Tank Founder and Thiel Fellow Raises $7M led by True Ventures to Build Ops Agents for US Manufacturers

After a decade building factories from scratch, Benjamin Stern will use the capital to accelerate growth and expand the Tenkara team

SAN FRANCISCO, March 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Tenkara, the company building ops agents for US manufacturers, today announced $7 million in funding led by True Ventures. The round includes participation from HF0, WndrCo, Articulate Capital, Night Capital, SF1, Transpose, early employees at Flexport, and others.

There are roughly 600,000 manufacturing firms in the U.S.^¹ and 98% are small businesses^². These companies were built to make products, not to be world-class at finding, qualifying, and managing suppliers. Since procurement teams at mid-market factories are tiny, the work of sourcing materials, tracking costs, managing logistics, and staying compliant falls on a handful of people who are already stretched thin. Most mid-market manufacturers lack the resources to expand their back-office teams. The result is predictable: materials cost more than they should^⁵, over half of projects run late^³, and every compliance gap costs an average of $19,000^⁴. These issues erode margins and breed distrust in domestic supply chains.

Tenkara is building the next-generation tooling for supply chains. The company's agents take on the back-office burden so that lean teams can operate like organizations 10 times their size. In its first 18 months, Tenkara signed multiple seven-figure contracts with U.S. manufacturers.

Tenkara founder and CEO Benjamin Stern is a manufacturing owner and operator. He started his first company in high school, appeared on Shark Tank, and closed a deal with Mark Cuban. Over the next decade, he built two factories from scratch and managed production for several consumer brands.

A 2020 Thiel Fellow, Stern founded Tenkara to fix the broken systems he lived with on the factory floor every day. He is joined by founding team Evan Adkins (engineering) and Jonah Stillman (commercialization). Both are serial entrepreneurs. The team is building out of HF0, the most selective startup residency in the world (0.04% acceptance rate).

"American manufacturing doesn't have a talent problem. It has an infrastructure problem. A three-person procurement team at a $50 million factory is expected to do the same job as a 50-person department at a Fortune 500. We're building the software that closes that gap."

- Benjamin Stern, Founder & CEO, Tenkara

"For the past 20 years, True Ventures has backed founders with a visceral belief in building something from nothing - founders who live the problem before they set out to solve it. This is Ben. He spent a decade building vertically integrated manufacturing plants, developing deep empathy for the customers he now serves with Tenkara. This kind of customer understanding is rare, and as domestic manufacturing becomes increasingly important, it's exactly what this market needs. We believe Tenkara is foundational to how the next generation of American factories are built."

- Phil Black, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, True Ventures

About Tenkara
Founded in 2024, Tenkara builds mission-critical infrastructure for US manufacturers. The company's agents automate the operational work that keeps factories running: supplier discovery, procurement, compliance, and freight. The founding team has collectively built factories, shipped consumer products, engineered systems at Bridgewater, and advised manufacturers like 3M.

Learn more at tenkara.ai

About True Ventures

True Ventures is a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that is first to believe in brilliant founders and invests in them at the earliest stages, when partnership matters most. Founded in 2005, the firm manages $4 billion in committed capital across over 450 teams spanning AI, software, hardware, cybersecurity, consumer, digital biology, and more. Notable investments include Veza, Enveda, Iceye, Handshake, Peloton, Duo Security, and HashiCorp. Learn more at trueventures.com.

About HF0

The most selective startup residency in the world (0.04% acceptance rate). San Francisco. hf0.com

Sources
^¹ IBISWorld, Number of Businesses in Manufacturing in the US
^² National Association of Manufacturers, Facts About Manufacturing
^³ Tealbook, The Agility Edge: Seeking Suppliers
^⁴ MadCap Software, The High Cost of Regulatory Non-Compliance
^⁵ CoreX Corp, 11 Critical Stats on Procurement (2024)

SOURCE Tenkara Labs, Inc.