Arda Raises $3.5M Seed Round to Bring Physical-World UI to Manufacturing Inventory

Arda has raised a $3.5M seed round, backed by Stage2 and Grid, to help manufacturers replace whiteboards, spreadsheets, and ERP workarounds with shop-floor-first replenishment software.

Manufacturing teams are under pressure from every direction: supply-chain volatility, changing trade rules, labor shortages, and the loss of hard-won operational knowledge as experienced workers retire. Yet the daily work of keeping production supplied still runs, at every scale, on whiteboards, spreadsheets, Slack messages, and heroic follow-up from a few people who know where everything is.

That gap is why we started Arda. Manufacturers do not need another system that asks operators to leave the floor, log into software, and manually keep a database current. They need a replenishment system that lives where inventory decisions actually happen: on bins, racks, carts, and production lines.

Software That Adapts to the Shop Floor

Arda pairs physical Kanban cards with digital ordering workflows. When a part hits its reorder point, the card is the interface. A scan can trigger the reorder process, preserve the audit trail, and give the team visibility without forcing a new behavior that breaks under real production pressure.

With Arda cards we found the perfect fit for our inventory management. We had seriously pursued other management software but found they were either too comprehensive for our small company or too big of an investment to implement. Arda Cards provided a system that was simple to implement and easy to get our team to follow. With over 400 parts and 40 different suppliers this made for a significant time savings.

Kyle Fishburn, Owner, Nook Vans

That physical-world interface has produced results across very different manufacturing environments. Rossmonster used Arda to double revenue, double production, and reduce inventory by 80%. In a paid pilot with a publicly traded aviation business, Arda eliminated stockouts on the deployed line, increased line uptime by 12.5%, and is expanding into another department.

Traction Before the Full Software Launch

We intentionally de-risked the value of the operating model before building a full software product. Starting with low-code and no-code systems, Arda reached meaningful commercial traction with a small team and a very hands-on go-to-market motion.

• $325k subscription revenue run rate
• $45k affiliate revenue run rate
• 58 paying customers
• 300+ free Kanban card users
• 9,000 orders placed through Arda
• $40M in order value placed through Arda

We also launched a free Kanban card tool to help smaller manufacturers get started quickly. It did what we hoped for SMBs, and it also pulled in demand from much larger organizations. Teams from GM, GE, Thermo Fisher, and SpaceX found their way to Arda because the pain is the same inside enterprise manufacturers: the official ERP exists, but the replenishment work still leaks into side systems, spreadsheets, and tribal knowledge.

What This Round Unlocks

The seed round lets us move from a manual, founder-led motion into a product-led and software-supported go-to-market engine. The immediate work is straightforward: make it possible to try Arda without talking to a human first, route free card creation directly into the product, instrument the full customer journey, and support the manufacturers already asking us to expand.

We are investing in the team and systems needed to scale that motion: marketing, GTM engineering, sales, implementation, product, engineering, and design support. We are also expanding the commerce layer around replenishment, including affiliate revenue beyond Amazon, deeper enterprise deployments, and future group-buy and B2B Kanban workflows once enough production lines are connected through Arda.

The Bigger Vision

Our long-term goal is to establish Arda as the category leader in material flow management software. We believe the production line is the atomic unit of the supply chain. If Arda can make replenishment reliable at the line level, the downstream opportunities are much larger: better purchasing data, stronger supplier coordination, lower carrying costs, and eventually new ways for manufacturers to buy together or trigger orders across customer-supplier relationships.

For now, the mission is simpler: help manufacturers stop running out of the parts that keep production moving, without forcing their teams into software that was never designed for the shop floor.

Create free Kanban cards or book a demo to see how Arda works.