Katerra

Construction techUSA

New to Unitard

💀 Dead / Bankrupt

Peak $4 BillionToday

~-100%

from peak

🦄
Became a unicorn
2017
📈
Peak valuation
$4 Billion ’18
💔
Became a Unitard
2021
💸
Last valuation
Wiped out

Capital raised

$2B

Total raised

$907K/day

Raised per day

Total raised averaged per day over approximately 6.0 years from founding to bankruptcy or shutdown. This is not measured cash burn. Methodology

Funding: TechCrunch / Axios

Current status

Shut down 2021

The rise & fall

7 moments · 2015–2021

The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.

2015

Founded to industrialize construction

Ex-Flextronics chief Michael Marks promises factory-built buildings, end to end.

Wikipedia

2017

Joins the unicorn club

SoftBank money starts flowing into the prefab vision.

Bloomberg

Jan 2018

The peak: SoftBank leads $865M$4B

The round values Katerra around $4B as factories and acquisitions multiply.

Reuters

2019–20

Quality problems and cost overruns

Its debut product needs a ground-up redo; projects slip; cash drains despite fresh SoftBank support.

The Information

2020

From the inside · Glassdoor reviews, 2020

Employees called it a year early: Glassdoor reviews from mid-2020 reported unpaid factory rent and batch firings and predicted bankruptcy outright, while others described consumer-electronics executives running construction they didn't understand.

Mar 2021

Greensill's collapse cuts the lifeline

The implosion of its lender wipes out a key financing arrangement.

WSJ

Jun 2021

Chapter 11 — joins the Unitard Club 💔

Staff get three days' notice and no severance; roughly $2B of SoftBank money is gone.

Court filing

$4Bof peak value erased · 6 years

💬 entries paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗; dated facts carry their source.

How it happened

Katerra was a SoftBank-backed construction-technology startup that aimed to industrialize building with prefabrication and an end-to-end model, reaching a ~$4B valuation in 2018. Quality problems, cost overruns, and operational missteps drained capital despite large SoftBank investment. When it filed for bankruptcy in June 2021, staff got three days' notice and no severance — a near-total loss.

Source: SoftBank-backed