Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines.

My name is Alex and this is our interview show where we sit down with a guest think about their work and unpack the rest.

Today we are talking with Deepka Rana, a principal on the investment team at North Zone.

If you don't know her, she grew up in Germany and the UK graduated with a degree in physics from the Imperial College of London.

She's still based there, joined North Zone back in 2019, focuses on early-stage companies across the consumer internet and B2B SARS areas and whoa I got a lot of

information on you deepka. She what about the future of work recently and is generally

a Bon Vivant? Deepka welcome to the show.

Hi Alex thanks for having me.

And then for folks who just want to know a little bit more about your firm,

three years after putting together, I think it was roughly a half billion dollar fund.

North Zone put together about a billion euro in capital across.

It was an early stage fund and a growth fund, correct?

That's right.

And when did all of that kind of wrap up, just so people know when you guys closed off that last

set of investment vehicles?

We close and announced the latest set of funds at the end of last year.

Fantastic.

And I was talking to you before we hit record.

I thought that Kota was your most recent deal, actually it's Katana and I was hoping you

could give us just a really quick note about what they're doing and why you chose them to

invest in. Yeah Katana is a Estonian startup It's building a software ERP platform for manufacturing business in the ERP space.

It doesn't just cater to manufacturers, anyone who deals with inventory.

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