Bridging the Divide Between Design and Engineering Teams
Aligning design and engineering teams on digital product creation remains a significant challenge for enterprises. Disparate tools and scattered information often lead to miscommunication, inefficiency, and delays in product launches. Designers typically use platforms like Figma for UI development, while engineers manage source code via systems such as Git. Without a unified workspace, maintaining consistency across multiple brands and websites becomes increasingly complex.
Knapsack offers an enterprise-grade collaboration platform designed to synchronize UI designers, product managers, and engineers. By integrating with tools like Figma and Git, Knapsack consolidates design changes and code updates into a single source of truth. This unified approach ensures that design specifications—such as button dimensions or brand colors—are consistently documented and adhered to, preventing errors and preserving brand integrity across all digital assets.
$10 Million Series A Funding Accelerates Expansion
On October 9, 2025, Knapsack announced the closing of a $10 million Series A round, bringing total funding raised to $20.8 million. The round was led by Builders VC, with participation from Crosslink Capital, Epic Ventures, Mana Ventures, and Lorimer Ventures. The company plans to expand its team substantially, having recently hired 14 new employees in addition to its existing staff of nearly 30 full-time team members.
Introducing AI Capabilities to Enhance Brand Consistency
Knapsack is integrating advanced AI features, including an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server based on Anthropic’s open-source standard. This technology enables AI models like ChatGPT and Gemini to access a company’s design and brand guidelines, producing responses that align with established standards. Currently in limited beta, these AI agents help teams maintain consistency and accuracy when generating design-related content or code, bridging the gap between human creativity and automated assistance.
Accelerating System of Record Setup with Ingestion Engine
Knapsack is developing an ingestion engine designed to drastically reduce the time required to establish a system of record—a comprehensive repository of company data and design assets. Traditionally a months-long process, Knapsack aims to condense this to just a few days. This innovation will facilitate faster onboarding for new teams and projects, enabling quicker product development cycles and improved operational efficiency.
Proven Results: Pharmaceutical Sector Case Study
“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,” said CEO Chris Strahl.
With the ingestion engine’s upcoming launch, the company expects these timelines to improve further, demonstrating Knapsack’s potential to transform enterprise digital workflows.
Upcoming Features and Vision
Later this year, Knapsack plans to introduce a feature that allows teams to explore user interfaces and generate real web pages using authentic code, further bridging design and development. CEO Chris Strahl envisions Knapsack as a platform integral to the future of digital experiences, especially as agentic AI becomes more widespread. He imagines personalized AI agents that understand user preferences and facilitate seamless brand interactions across applications.
“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.’ 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,” Strahl explained.
He added, “In my opinion, that experience should come from Knapsack. 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.”
FinOracleAI — Market View
Knapsack’s recent $10 million funding and its strategic integration of AI capabilities position it as a significant player in enterprise digital collaboration. By addressing persistent challenges in design-engineering alignment, the company is poised to accelerate product development and enhance brand consistency across complex digital ecosystems.
- Opportunities: Adoption by large enterprises managing multiple brands; expansion of AI-powered collaboration tools; reduction in product launch timelines.
- Risks: Competition from established design and development platforms; dependency on AI accuracy for brand compliance; scalability challenges with rapid growth.
Impact: Knapsack’s innovations are likely to improve operational efficiency for enterprise clients, reducing time-to-market for digital products and enhancing cross-team collaboration.
