The Fix That Became a Platform
Before Kyle Mack built Middesk, he watched a problem eat time alive. At Checkr - the background-check company where he was one of the first five employees and eventually Director of Solutions - every new enterprise customer had to be manually verified before they could access sensitive data: criminal histories, Social Security numbers, dates of birth. The process was supposed to protect Checkr. In practice, it was a maze of mismatched government records, stale data, and manual chasing.
Mack didn't set out to build infrastructure. He set out to fix one specific, ugly thing. When businesses are formed, there's a narrow window - roughly one month - where they're trying to open accounts, access credit, get banking relationships. But the data about those businesses takes six to twelve months to appear in public registries. Traditional verification tools were built on that stale data. The result: every financial institution doing Know Your Business (KYB) checks was essentially guessing.
Why Business Identity Broke
When a company is formed, its information takes 6-12 months to propagate through public registries. Banks and fintechs need to verify that company in its first month. That gap - between when a business exists and when the data says so - is where fraud lives, and where Middesk lives too.
In 2018, Mack co-founded Middesk with Kurt Ruppel, who had spent time at both Zendesk and Checkr. Their pitch was deceptively simple: build the data infrastructure that makes business identity verification fast, accurate, and automatable. Not a compliance checkbox. A genuine intelligence layer. They went through Y Combinator's Winter 2019 batch and raised a $4M seed from Accel and Sequoia before most people had heard of "KYB" as a market category.
The category found them. Regulators tightened anti-money-laundering requirements. Fintechs scaled their onboarding. Every financial institution discovered the same gaping problem Mack had spotted at Checkr. Middesk was already there.
Middesk requires all new employees to spend a day doing manual business verification, ensuring everyone always has our customers' problems top of mind.
- Kyle Mack, Sequoia Capital "Seven Questions" (2021)400 Government Agencies. One API Call.
Middesk's core claim is direct access: the company connects to approximately 400 U.S. government agencies to surface entity data in real time. Not aggregated, delayed, licensed-from-someone-else data. Direct. That distinction turns out to matter enormously when a bank needs to onboard a business today, not in three months when the state registry updates.
The platform has three integrated pieces: a data layer aggregating government records, APIs that plug into risk models and onboarding workflows, and a dashboard for compliance and risk teams. Middesk charges per API call - a model that scales naturally with the customers it serves. When fintechs grow, Middesk grows with them.
Building the Category, Round by Round
Middesk's fundraising arc mirrors its market traction. Each round arrived as a new layer of the financial system woke up to the KYB problem - first early-stage fintechs, then tier-one banks, then the compliance teams that had been doing everything manually for decades.
Series B Signal
At the $57M Series B close in June 2022, Middesk had 350 clients and 40 employees. Mack announced plans to reach 120 employees - tripling headcount on the back of institutional demand that had been building since the fintech boom of 2020-21.
The Sequoia Connection
Sequoia backed Middesk from the seed round and Mack became a Sequoia Scout - meaning he actively helps identify the next generation of early-stage founders while running a company. A rare dual role that reflects how operators get recycled in the valley.
From Enterprise Sales to Infrastructure Founder
Mack's path to founding Middesk was thoroughly operational. He wasn't a first-time founder with a thesis - he was an enterprise sales professional who accumulated a very specific frustration across very specific companies until the frustration became unavoidable.
Data - not AI - is the real bottleneck holding fintech innovation back.
- Kyle Mack, Fintech Layer Cake PodcastThe New Employee Test
There's a management choice at Middesk that says more about how Mack builds than any mission statement. Every person who joins the company, regardless of role, spends their first day doing manual business verification. Not reading about it. Doing it - the same tedious, error-prone, time-consuming process that Middesk's platform replaces.
The logic is straightforward but rarely executed: if you haven't felt the problem, you'll optimize for the wrong things. Engineers who have manually chased a Secretary of State filing through three different state portals build different APIs than engineers who haven't. Product managers who have watched a compliance team drown in manual review queues prioritize differently than those who learned the problem from a slide deck.
Mack credits Sequoia's AMP program for shaping another side of his operating philosophy: the distinction between building a company and building a product. It's the kind of observation that sounds obvious but changes how decisions get made - you can build a very good product inside a very poorly structured company, and only one of those things eventually kills you.
On Uncertainty
"To navigate uncertainty, I think it's important to stay optimistic and embrace a spirit of adventure." - Kyle Mack, Sequoia Capital (2021)
On Hard Decisions
"The difficult-to-reverse, high-impact decisions are harder, but I think the first step is giving them the space they deserve."
Challenging the Century-Old Incumbents
The KYB market was not a greenfield when Middesk entered. Dun & Bradstreet had been in the business data business since 1841. Equifax had decades of commercial credit history. These were not lightweight incumbents. They were the infrastructure that banks had built their underwriting on for generations.
Middesk's competitive claim wasn't that the incumbents were wrong. It was that they were slow, and the financial system had become fast. Fintech onboarding happens in minutes. Traditional business verification took days. The gap between the speed of the application and the speed of the decision was where businesses fell through the cracks and where fraud found its opening.
The company's approach - direct government agency connections, real-time data, developer-first API design - was designed for the financial infrastructure that exists today, not the one that existed when the incumbents built their systems. That's a different value proposition than "we have more data." It's "we have the right data at the right time in the right format."
The Market Mack Is Building For
KYB has expanded beyond regulatory compliance. Today it powers credit risk assessment, fraud prevention, marketplace trust and safety, payments onboarding, and automated business decisioning. Every time a fintech wants to onboard a business in under a minute, there's an infrastructure need underneath it.
The Record
- Co-founded Middesk, raising $77M+ from Sequoia, Accel, Insight Partners, and Canapi Ventures across seed through Series B
- Connected Middesk's platform to approximately 400 U.S. government agencies for real-time entity data access
- Grew to 500+ enterprise clients including two of the top three U.S. banks
- Achieved $11.3M annual revenue with a lean, focused 94-person team in 2024
- Led company through Y Combinator W19 and three successive funding rounds in three years
- Became a Sequoia Scout - investing in early-stage founders on behalf of Sequoia Capital while running Middesk as CEO
- One of the first five employees at Checkr; built the enterprise solutions team from scratch as Director of Solutions
- Speaker at Money20/20 US and Finovate Spring; featured in Sequoia Capital's "Seven Questions" founder series
The Specifics
How He Operates
The manual verification day is a personality tell. Mack is the kind of operator who builds organizational rituals from specific experiences rather than management theory. He's not an optimist who avoids bad news - he's an optimist who thinks the most useful response to uncertainty is curiosity, not caution.
His framework for decisions has an interesting asymmetry. Reversible, low-stakes decisions: move fast. Difficult-to-reverse, high-impact decisions: slow down and give them dedicated space. Not because the big decisions are harder to think about, but because they deserve the cognitive bandwidth that low-stakes decisions don't.
On innovation, he's similarly calibrated: know where to build something new and where to adopt an existing playbook. In an industry where every startup claims to be reinventing something, Mack is comfortable acknowledging which parts of what Middesk does are genuinely novel and which parts are well-understood problems with proven solutions.