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Today, we announced that Tenkara raised $7 million led by True Ventures.
Published March 17, 2026
I was 14 when I fell in love with making things.
I’d watch How It’s Made on repeat, pausing episodes to sketch my own ideas and think through ways they could be made better. The grueling, brain-and-back-aching work of watching those concepts come to life had me hooked, and gave me a sense of purpose.
Over the next ten years, I built two manufacturing facilities from the ground up. I was living the dream I had drawn up in my head as a kid.
Yet I was drowning.
Me fiddling with broken machines
The actual time dedicated to making products commanded a small fraction of my attention. The rest was operational infrastructure. Invisible scaffolding that nobody designed. It just accumulated. Slowly, the work that pulled me into manufacturing in the first place got crowded out by everything that didn’t. Every hour spent chasing a compliance doc or tracking down a material was an hour not spent building a better product or landing a new customer.
Every single piece in the production process is load-bearing. Drop one and you don’t make your run.
To help fix the broken structure, I bought expensive ERPs on marketing promises, then handed them to a procurement team of three and expected the software to hum. It didn’t. And we were stuck patching the gaps.
American manufacturers produced nearly $3 trillion of value just in Q3 of 2025. They are the backbone of the physical economy. 98% of these factories are small businesses. Yet the tools designed for staffing much larger orgs don’t scale down easily to meet the needs of the 98%.
I stepped away as CEO of Nohbo in 2024 because I was certain the moment to fix this had arrived. Software has become magical these past couple of years. It’s taken shape to become a contributor and executor of work rather than just an organizer of it. A team of three can now operate like a team of fifty.
Enter Tenkara.
We’re building ops agents for American manufacturers, and we are doing it at the moment when the world needs this most. Supply chains are under enormous pressure right now. The conflict in the Middle East has oil nearly $100 a barrel and critical shipping routes disrupted. Freight rates are skyrocketing nearly 400%. Unfortunately, not every manufacturer will survive this. The ones that do will be best in class at finding supply and minimizingThe nation that makes a great noise in the world is the nation that makes things disruptions.
The people keeping the lights on at factories across this country deserve better tools than the tools they’ve been given.
We’re going to give it to them.
-Ben
Founder & CEO of Tenkara
