Katerra
Construction techUSA
New to Unitard
💀 Dead / Bankrupt
Peak $4 BillionToday
~-100%
from peak
- 🦄Became a unicorn2017
- 📈Peak valuation$4 Billion ’18
- 💔Became a Unitard2021
- 💸Last valuationWiped out
🔥 Raised & burned
$2B
Total raised
$907K/day
Burned · 6.0y alive
Funding: TechCrunch / Axios
Current status
Shut down 2021
The rise & fall
7 moments · 2015–2021The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.
2015
2015
Founded to industrialize construction
Ex-Flextronics chief Michael Marks promises factory-built buildings, end to end.
Wikipedia
2017
2017
Joins the unicorn club
SoftBank money starts flowing into the prefab vision.
Bloomberg
Jan 2018
Jan 2018
The peak: SoftBank leads $865M$4B
The round values Katerra around $4B as factories and acquisitions multiply.
Reuters
2019–20
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
Mar 2021
Greensill's collapse cuts the lifeline
The implosion of its lender wipes out a key financing arrangement.
WSJ
Jun 2021
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
Founder
- Michael Marksfounder & CEONo public profile matched
