Why We Backed Tenkara to Build Back-Office Infrastructure for Manufacturing
By Phil Black, March 17, 2026
We’re witnessing an exciting moment in industrial markets, where new technology is unlocking dramatic efficiencies and real cost reductions for manufacturers—not incremental improvements, but transformative ones that change how work actually gets done.
But to us, technology is only half the story. The other half is the Founder. Before building Tenkara, Ben Stern spent nearly a decade on factory floors, an experience that has shaped every decision behind the company and given him an empathetic understanding of his customers.
Ben started his first company, Nohbo, at 14, closed a deal on Shark Tank at 16, spent the next decade operating Nohbo’s manufacturing facilities and consulting on others, and received the Thiel Fellowship in 2020. He’s clearly been busy.
Today, most mid-market manufacturers in the US are small businesses, where lean back-office teams of two or three people shoulder the entire weight of a plant’s operations, from supplier negotiations and compliance paperwork to freight logistics and cost tracking. Ben navigated this operational complexity for years while building Nohbo, and came away with a clear conviction that the bottleneck was never the people—it was that the industry had never been given the tooling to succeed. So he built it.
Tenkara’s platform aggregates supplier data into a live graph, gives teams a single place to manage materials, costs, and shipments, and deploys agents to handle the communication chaos that adds to operational overhead. For back-office teams, this means quoting in minutes instead of days, with full clarity on margins and timelines. For the factory as a whole, it means fewer shortages, lower costs, and the ability to drive efficiencies and outputs like plants 10x their size.
Their approach is clearly resonating—in their first 18 months, they’ve signed multiple seven-figure contracts with US manufacturers, and they’re just getting started.
The downstream implications go beyond any single factory. With real visibility into cost and shortage data, and sophisticated agents that can act on that information autonomously, Tenkara increases supply chain resilience and decreases volatility for every manufacturer on the platform. This benefits their customers directly and, over time, strengthens the US as a competitive domestic manufacturing hub.
For the past 20 years, True has backed Founders with a visceral belief in building something from nothing—Founders with strong points of view, even when the path seems unclear to others, and teams that enter blue ocean markets with speed and ambition. We’re proud to continue this tradition by partnering with Ben and his founding team, Evan Adkins and Jonah Stillman.