The Austin marketplace trying to rent a global supply chain to anyone with a product idea.
Every year, thousands of entrepreneurs sketch a product they are sure the world needs - a smarter dog bowl, a quieter blender, a bag with one more pocket. Most of those sketches die in a notebook, undone not by a lack of imagination but by a wall of logistics: which factory, at what price, with what tooling, shipped from where. Gembah, founded in Austin in 2018, exists to knock that wall down.
The company operates as a product-development platform and marketplace. It connects creators - entrepreneurs, Amazon sellers, and small-to-midsize consumer brands - with a global network of designers, engineers, and supply-chain specialists, then coordinates the whole journey from concept to finished, shelf-ready goods. The internal slogan is blunt: "Find & develop your next million-dollar product."
The gap Gembah's founders describe the market as split between two bad options. On one side is white-label sourcing, where you slap a logo on a generic product everyone else is also selling. On the other is inventing from scratch, which demands an engineering team, factory relationships, and a tolerance for months of risk. Gembah's pitch is the middle path it calls Direct to Manufacturing - differentiated products, made well, without owning the machinery to make them.
The reach is the product. Gembah's bench of designers has built for names like Under Armour and Weber Grills, and its factory network spans China, Vietnam, Thailand, India, Mexico, ASEAN, and Eastern Europe. Local Gembah teams sit in several of those regions, which matters when a sample goes wrong and someone has to walk the factory floor.
Gembah packages product development into a managed pipeline. Clients collaborate with an assigned team inside a software platform, reviewing renderings, samples, and quality audits, and tracking production with payment oversight built in.
Market and competitive analysis to find a defensible idea.
Concepts, CAD, 2D/3D renders, and a full design pack.
Vetted factories compete on price and quality.
Sampling, tooling, audits, and managed logistics.
Digital-ad demand testing to find price and audience.
Market research and ideation, concept development, engineering, and complete design packs - CAD plus 2D and 3D renderings with feasibility flags.
Factory discovery, sampling and tooling, production management, quality and compliance audits, and purchase-order support with full payment transparency.
Direct-to-consumer market testing with digital ads to measure engagement, identify a profitable audience, and set an optimal price before scaling.
"Democratizing and demystifying the product creation process."
Gembah's customers are the people for whom supply chain is a distraction from the business: e-commerce sellers with hundreds of SKUs, D2C brands, and first-time founders. Two portfolio e-commerce firms show the range. 101 Commerce, which sells micro-brands through Amazon FBA, used Gembah to update and renegotiate more than 1,000 existing SKUs its own team had no time to chase. Profound Commerce went further.
The second country is not a footnote. By sourcing new factories in India alongside its Chinese suppliers, Profound Commerce tripled production output and sidestepped tariff exposure - a hedge that has only grown more valuable as trade policy swings.
Gembah sits between tools that solve only one slice of the problem. Freelance marketplaces like Fiverr and Upwork can hand you a designer but not a factory. Alibaba can hand you a factory but not a vetted one, and no one to call when a shipment fails inspection. Traditional sourcing agents cover the manufacturing end but rarely the design and market-testing that precede it.
Gembah's wager is that owning the boring, breakable middle - sampling, tooling, audits, cross-border payments - is where the real value hides. The pretty render is the easy five percent. The other ninety-five is logistics, and that is the part Gembah is built to manage.
Gembah runs a marketplace and managed-service model. It charges fees for product-development work - design, engineering, sourcing, and production management - while curating the network of designers and factories that fulfills it. Crucially, Gembah does not own the factories; it coordinates and oversees them, taking responsibility for quality and delivery without the capital weight of owning plants.
Henrik Johansson and Zack Leonard launch Gembah to democratize product creation.
Silverton Partners leads a seed round to build out the platform.
ATX Venture Partners leads a Series A with Silverton, Flexport, and angel investors.
Gembah lands on the Inc. 5000 and launches a marketplace to fast-track unique products.
A second consecutive Inc. 5000 honor amid continued growth.
Co-founder and CEO. A serial entrepreneur who previously co-founded Boundless and grew it to about $100M in revenue before it was acquired by Zazzle in 2014.
Co-founder and President, helping steer Gembah's global network of designers, engineers, and supply-chain specialists.
A globally distributed team with members across the US, Mexico, Brazil, the UK, India, China, and Vietnam - people close to the factories they manage.
Gembah is a product development platform and marketplace that helps businesses research, design, and manufacture physical products by connecting them with vetted designers, engineers, and factories worldwide.
Entrepreneurs, Amazon and e-commerce sellers, D2C brands, and small-to-midsize consumer product companies. Gembah says it has helped over 1,000 customers.
Through a vetted factory network spanning China, Vietnam, Thailand, India, Mexico, ASEAN, and Eastern Europe, with local Gembah teams in several regions.
Gembah was founded in 2018 in Austin, Texas, by Henrik Johansson (CEO) and Zack Leonard (President).
Gembah has raised about $14.3M total, including a $3.28M seed round in 2020 and an $11M Series A in 2021 led by ATX Venture Partners.