- Company — Katerra
- Sector — Construction technology / modular building
- Founded / Died — 2015 / Chapter 11 June 2021
- Lifespan — ~6 years
- Capital raised — ~$2B+, overwhelmingly from SoftBank Vision Fund; peak valuation ~$4B (2018)
- Peak scale — ~8,000 employees globally; factories in Arizona, Washington and India; billions in claimed project backlog.
- What it built — A vertically integrated construction company: designing buildings, manufacturing components in its own factories, and acting as general contractor.
- Stated cause of death — The Chapter 11 filing cited an inability to secure additional capital after Greensill Capital — its lender — itself collapsed in March 2021.
- Evidenced cause — Major divergence. Greensill's failure was the trigger and is genuinely exogenous. The cause was that Katerra took fixed-price contracts at a loss to fill factories built before demand existed, ran project controls that reportedly could not distinguish profitable from unprofitable jobs, and expanded into several countries at once. Employee accounts describe factories far below capacity and designs that could not be manufactured as specified.
- Warning signs visible earlier — SoftBank had already provided a $200M rescue in 2020 alongside a management change — a bailout eighteen months before the end.
- Money outcome — SoftBank lost the great majority of ~$2B. Roughly 8,000 employees lost jobs; some US staff received little notice. Subcontractors and suppliers were left as unsecured creditors on live projects.
- Post-mortem quality — None from the company. The most useful documents are trade-press interviews with former employees and the bankruptcy filings themselves.
- Transferable lesson — Vertical integration in a low-margin, project-based industry requires world-class cost accounting before it requires scale. If you cannot compute project-level margin weekly, capacity expansion multiplies losses rather than revenue.
- Sources — TechCrunch · Architect Magazine, "Katerra's $2 Billion Legacy" · SBCA, employee accounts
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