
The Essert founder has spent years translating dense rules into worklists, controls and software. His bet is simple: compliance works better when it behaves like a product, not a pile of paperwork.
Workiva is a cloud software company that turns the painful, deadline-driven work of regulatory, financial, and sustainability reporting into a connected, audit-ready process. Founded in Ames, Iowa, in 2008 as WebFilings, its platform links data, documents, and people in real time so finance, risk, audit, and ESG teams can collect, manage, and report critical business data with full version control and traceability. Today Workiva serves more than 6,000 organizations - including a large share of the Fortune 500 - and is layering agentic AI across finance, GRC, and sustainability workflows.