At seven years old, Alexander Kuebel had inventory trouble. The inventory was duplicate Panini stickers, which is the kind of problem that exists only after a child has become serious about collecting. His solution was to repackage the doubles in branded packets and sell them. It was modest commerce, but the shape of the idea has followed him: find scattered assets, organize them, make the result easier for someone else to use.
Two decades later, the packets are data models. The duplicates have become hundreds of human-resources systems, each with its own authentication, fields, permissions, and peculiar failures. Kuebel is co-founder and CEO of Kombo, a company that gives software makers one interface for connecting with applicant-tracking systems, payroll tools, HR information systems, assessment products, and learning platforms. Customers build once. Kombo handles what changes underneath.
This is infrastructure work, which means success often looks like the absence of a story. A candidate arrives where the recruiter expects. A new employee appears in the correct system. A departing worker loses access on time. The connector does not become a support ticket. Kuebel has found a business in making that sequence feel uneventful.
01 / EARLY SIGNALSA founder before the vocabulary
Kuebel says he started playing basketball at four, launched the sticker trade at seven, and formed his first legal company at 18. He also collects owls. These details come from a short list of fun facts he offered in a 2023 interview, but together they sketch a person drawn to teams, systems, and the small satisfaction of arranging a collection.
Basketball was more than a childhood pastime. During the 2013-2014 season, he captained the Young Tigers Tübingen in Germany's under-16 JBBL, a national league built to develop young players. Years later, his professional story would again center on a compact team trying to move in concert.
That education became literal at CODE University of Applied Sciences in Berlin. It was where Kuebel met Aike Hillbrands, Fabian Rothfuß, and Niklas Higi, the engineers who would become his Kombo co-founders. He has said CODE was the first place where his drive to build did not feel isolating. It also gave the group roughly two years to discover how a startup could go wrong.
02 / THE USEFUL PIVOTThe first company left behind the right scars
Before Kombo, the four founders wanted a project they could tackle together. They built a company around apk-mitm, an open-source project from one of the co-founders, and helped clients extract and analyze data from mobile applications. The company was known as Scopas. It did not become their lasting product, but it forced them to learn how different APIs communicate and where that communication breaks.
One assignment touched talent acquisition. Job boards needed to connect with the applicant-tracking systems used by their customers, and every connection carried its own implementation work. The founders had been breaking apart mobile-data silos. Here was another silo, attached to a market that kept producing new software. They changed direction.
Kombo's insight was less about inventing a new endpoint than changing who carries the maintenance. Without a shared layer, every software company builds similar connectors and then keeps engineers available for every vendor update. With Kombo, those teams trade direct control for a common model, an integration dashboard, configurable scopes, logs, webhooks, and support from people who repeatedly encounter the same systems.
03 / LEARNING THE RESTEngineering strength meets company craft
Kombo entered Y Combinator's Summer 2022 batch. Kuebel later described the founding team as already strong in engineering. The accelerator's value was everything around the code: B2B sales, fundraising, product prioritization, and the maintenance of co-founder relationships. It condensed mistakes other startups had already made and gave a young team permission to think beyond its age.
The early company made deliberately simplifying choices. In 2023, Kuebel said Kombo was hiring on-site in Berlin to avoid adding remote-work complexity while the founders were still learning how to build a team. They surrounded themselves with investors who covered different needs. Y Combinator and 468 Capital understood venture formation; operators including Indeed co-founder Paul Forster and Beamery co-founder Sultan Saidov understood the industry problem.
Connectivity should stay “boringly reliable.”Alexander Kuebel on Kombo's role beneath product teams
The phrasing is revealing. Reliability has no launch-day glamour. It compounds through monitoring, security reviews, quick answers, and integrations that continue working after the original engineer has moved to another project. Kombo's website now emphasizes SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, configurable data collection, and 99.9 percent uptime. The company is selling technical calm.
A disclosed climb
Publicly reported annual recurring revenue milestones, not audited financial statements
Public milestones suggest that focus found demand. Y Combinator hiring materials reported growth from zero to more than $1 million in annual recurring revenue within a year. In May 2024, Kuebel wrote that Kombo had crossed $2 million, only six months after announcing $1 million. By the time he announced the Series A in 2026, he said the company had gone from zero to more than $10 million in roughly three years.
04 / CAPITAL AND PROOFThe replies mattered more than the round
In February 2026, Kombo raised a $25 million Series A led by Volition Capital, with Acadian Ventures, 468 Capital, and Y Combinator participating. The financing brought total disclosed funding to $30 million and added Volition partner Sean Cantwell to the board. Kombo said it served more than 300 companies at the time, including Indeed, Paychex, HireVue, Mercor, Gem, Edenred, Thatch, and Juicebox.
Kuebel treated the money as fuel, not a verdict. In a follow-up, he wrote that the reactions stayed with him: technical leaders described changing how they built, founders said their teams had stopped maintaining connectors, and customers recommended Kombo to other workforce-software vendors. The round was legible. The replies explained the product's effect.
There were other forms of validation. Kombo acquired Midlane, a former customer, in August 2025. In spring 2026, the company became an official Workday partner after already connecting hundreds of Workday customers across recruiting, payroll, core HR, and learning. A former customer became part of the company; a difficult integration provider became a formal partner. Relationships that had once been a central early obstacle were turning into distribution and trust.
05 / AFTER THE APIWhen the system has no useful door
An API company eventually meets a workflow the API cannot reach. Some enterprise systems omit a needed field. Others gate access behind a long security process. Legacy products may have no production-grade interface at all. For a company promising connectivity, stopping at the official door would leave part of the original problem intact.
Kombo's answer arrived in May 2026: browser-agent integrations that translate enterprise interfaces into deterministic workflows. The distinction matters. The company is not asking an agent to improvise. It wants repeatable outputs, traceable actions, debugging, and the reliability customers expect from an API. The first shipped use case, AI Apply, reads jobs and submits candidate applications across applicant-tracking systems without a conventional integration.
Use the door
Keep building deep, permissioned connections with common models and direct vendor partnerships.
Map the hallway
Turn the interface into a deterministic, monitored workflow instead of leaving the use case uncovered.
By then Kombo said it served more than 400 companies. The platform's scope had grown from HRIS to recruiting, payroll, assessments, and learning, yet the strategic line remained narrow: people data. Kuebel publicly contrasted that choice with competitors that expanded into other integration categories. Kombo kept following one set of customers deeper.
06 / TWO CITIESEuropean rigor, American scale
Kombo began as a Berlin company, and Berlin remains its technical center. Its current footprint also includes an office on Madison Avenue in New York, where Kuebel is based. The 2026 financing announcement framed the combination as European compliance-by-design paired with US ambition and scale. The language is polished, but the operating idea is concrete: keep engineering depth close while building customer and commercial capacity on both sides of the Atlantic.
The company has changed considerably from four students studying a mobile-analysis project. Kuebel's job has changed with it. He began as one of four software engineers looking for a project, then learned to sell a vertical product, recruit a team, assemble an industry-aware cap table, cross an ocean, and describe infrastructure in terms executives could buy.
The aspiration is larger than a catalog of connectors. Kuebel wants Kombo to become the trusted layer through which people data moves from hire to retire, across systems, tools, machines, and humans. That vision contains an appealing contradiction: the company must be important enough to sit beneath an ecosystem and quiet enough that its customers rarely have to think about it.
The sticker story endures because it makes the technical career legible. Kuebel keeps encountering collections that do not quite cohere. He packages them, gives the package a clear interface, and finds someone who values the order. Only now the collection contains Workday tenants, payroll records, course completions, candidate applications, and all the permissions between them. The seven-year-old merchant would recognize the move. He might just be surprised by the maintenance bill.