Orders arrive as PDFs. Suppliers want different formats. Finance wants to get paid. B2BE has built a business in the gaps between those demands - and its customer stories show why automation starts before the software.
In 2001, a nearly insolvent software company chose a brutal third option: shrink to 75 people and build the cloud network nobody in retail wanted to maintain. Twenty-five years later, that network moves more than 750 million transactions a year - and its next test is whether all that memory can make AI useful.
The 23-year-old integration company grew by making incompatible software talk. Its next bet is that the same plumbing can keep enterprise AI useful, visible, and on a leash.
The company most people have never heard of is quietly running the app, the bill and the payment page behind millions of power and water accounts. VertexOne sells utilities the one thing they rarely build well themselves: a modern customer experience.
Zack Kanter is the founder and CEO of Stedi, an API-first, cloud-native healthcare clearinghouse that routes eligibility checks, claims, and electronic payments between providers and insurers. He started his first company at 16, building a bootstrapped auto-parts wholesaler (Proforged) that he ran for roughly 13 years before selling it to Huron Capital. He then spent years wrestling with electronic data interchange (EDI), the arcane plumbing of business-to-business transactions, rewriting Stedi's codebase about eight times before finding extraordinary traction in healthcare. Along the way he became widely read for essays like 'Why Amazon is eating the world.' In March 2026 Stedi raised a $50M Series C led by Addition, bringing total funding to about $142M.
Stedi is an API-first, cloud-native healthcare clearinghouse that sits between providers and payers to move essential transactions - eligibility checks, claims, claim status, and electronic remittances - as programmable API calls instead of legacy batch files. Founded in 2017 by Zack Kanter, who came to EDI through an auto-parts business, Stedi rebuilt clearinghouse plumbing from scratch for the API and AI-agent era. It connects to thousands of U.S. payers, processes more than a billion transactions annually, and has raised $142 million from investors including Stripe, Addition, USV, and First Round.
Orderful is a modern, cloud-based EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) platform that connects supply chains. It replaces the slow, point-to-point EDI integrations that have governed B2B commerce for decades with a single API connection, web tooling, and an AI-native engine (Mosaic) that interprets and transforms trading-partner data automatically. More than 400 companies - including Liquid Death, Caraway, NFI, Hirschbach, Pabst, and Koch Industries - use Orderful to onboard partners in days instead of months and to process orders, invoices, and shipping documents in real time.
Crstl is a San Francisco-based, AI-native EDI and agentic B2B commerce network that connects brands, retailers, and logistics providers from order to payment. Its platform replaces the legacy, error-prone world of electronic data interchange with no-code integrations and an always-on AI agent named Edison that processes purchase orders, generates ASNs and invoices, and keeps merchants compliant with big-box retailers like Walmart, Target, and Whole Foods - so direct-to-consumer brands can scale into wholesale, marketplaces, and omnichannel retail without an EDI team.
Dipti Desai is the co-founder and CEO of Crstl, a San Francisco startup rebuilding B2B commerce around the decades-old EDI standard that quietly governs how brands sell to retailers. A Virginia Tech electrical engineer and Uber data-platform veteran, she stumbled into the problem while volunteering to sell PPE online during the pandemic and discovering that the plumbing of wholesale was stuck in the 1980s. She has raised over $10 million from Target, Shopify Ventures, Cohen Circle, and Village Global to make EDI usable by people who are not developers.
Steve Stevens (full name: John 'Steve' Stevens) is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Jopari Solutions, Inc., a Concord, California-based healthcare IT company he built from the ground up in 2003. Over more than two decades, Stevens transformed Jopari into a dominant force in electronic medical claims, attachments, and payment processing for Property & Casualty, Workers' Compensation, and Group Health markets - connecting 1.5 million healthcare providers with over 5,000 insurance payers and facilitating more than $1 billion in annual payments. In April 2026, Jopari was acquired by Office Ally, capping a career in which Stevens has raised over $100 million in private capital and helped pioneer digital healthcare claims workflows.