Tony Zakula

Founder and CEO Kodaris

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Tony Zakula is the founder and chief executive of Kodaris, an open software-as-a-service supply chain platform built for distributors and manufacturers that sell across both B2B and B2C channels. Founded in 2014 and running on Amazon Web Services, Kodaris integrates with a customer’s existing ERP rather than replacing it, and unifies commerce, CRM, logistics and quote-to-cash data in a single system. The design philosophy is deliberate and unusual in enterprise distribution software: roughly 80 percent of the platform ships ready to use, while the remaining 20 percent is customisable, so a distributor’s established processes shape the software rather than the reverse. Zakula is a working software engineer by background rather than a career executive, and that shows in how the product is positioned — as infrastructure that distributors can actually extend.

Career Highlights

• Founded Kodaris in 2014 and has led it as chief executive for more than a decade.
• Built the platform on AWS with an ERP-agnostic integration layer spanning commerce, CRM, logistics and quote-to-cash.
• Subject of an AWS Business Intelligence case study on Kodaris’ embedded Amazon QuickSight analytics, which AWS reported as returning 20x ROI for customers.
• Delivered self-serve analytics combining online and offline data to distributors that lack dedicated analytics teams.
• Worked in engineering at Expensify during the period when the company was building and maintaining its in-house cross-platform mobile framework.

Professional Journey

Zakula trained in computer information systems at what is now Purdue University Northwest and has described himself as a lifelong software engineer and entrepreneur, with working knowledge spanning technology, accounting, economics and business operations. That combination — engineering plus the financial and operational side of a business — is the background the distribution software market tends to reward, since the problems there are as much about order-to-cash workflow and margin as about code.

In the early 2010s he worked at Expensify, the expense management company, in enterprise and platform engineering roles during a formative stretch of its technical history. Expensify at that time ran an extremely small core team of generalists and had built YAPL, an in-house cross-platform JavaScript layer, at a moment when third-party options such as PhoneGap, Xamarin and Electron either did not exist or were immature. Zakula’s work sat in that cross-platform mobile and enterprise engineering area.

He left in 2014 to found Kodaris. The premise was that distributors and manufacturers were being poorly served by digital commerce software built for retail, and by ERP vendors whose commerce modules assumed the customer would reshape its business around the tool. Kodaris was built instead as an open platform that connects to whatever ERP a distributor already runs, and that exposes enough of itself to be customised by the customer.

More recently the company has extended into embedded analytics, integrating Amazon QuickSight so that distributors can combine online and offline data into near-real-time self-serve reporting without standing up an internal analytics function. Summarising the positioning in the AWS case study, Zakula said the company sells “the future because that’s where everybody is going”. Kodaris remains privately held and is headquartered in Peachtree City, Georgia.

Education

Purdue University Northwest

Bachelor’s degree, Computer Information Systems