business-identity
(2)
Diego Asenjo
Diego Asenjo is the CEO and co-founder of Mesh, an Austin-based B2B identity startup that verifies the legitimacy, licensing, insurance, and compliance of small businesses and sole proprietors in real time. A former Amazon product leader who built Business Prime into a multi-billion-dollar program, Diego left to fix a problem he 'could not unsee': the broken data infrastructure that quietly penalizes new, small, and micro businesses. His mission is personal, rooted in watching his father's small auto-parts shop in Argentina lose access to fair credit and opportunity as commerce went digital. Mesh raised a $5.7M seed round led by Greycroft and reports 99%+ satisfaction from the businesses it verifies.
Kurt Ruppel
Kurt Ruppel is the Co-Founder and CTO of Middesk, the business identity platform that helps financial institutions, fintechs, and marketplaces verify and onboard businesses in seconds rather than weeks. A UC Berkeley cognitive science alumnus turned engineer, he built his technical chops at Zendesk and Checkr before co-founding Middesk with Kyle Mack in 2018. The company went through Y Combinator's Winter 2019 batch, secured a $4M seed led by Accel and Sequoia before Demo Day ended, and raised a $57M Series B in 2022—bringing total funding to over $77M. Ruppel leads Middesk's technical vision, focusing on primitives and forward concepts that transform raw business data into actionable intelligence for the financial ecosystem.