Founder & CEO / Stedi
Zack Kanter
The slow-build founder rewiring the invisible plumbing of American healthcare.
Photo: Megan Newton Photography (zackkanter.com)
Zack Kanter did not set out to fix healthcare. He set out, at 16, to sell auto parts. With about $2,500 in starting capital he built a wholesale business that ran on software-like margins and, over roughly 13 years, grew into a genuinely profitable operation. In 2016 he sold it to Huron Capital and went looking for a harder problem.
He found one hiding in plain sight. Running the parts business, Kanter kept slamming into electronic data interchange - EDI, the decades-old file format that giant retailers like Amazon and Walmart still use to talk to their suppliers. There were no clean API specs, just arcane documents and brittle connections. The plumbing of business-to-business commerce was, in his words, the most complicated problem he had ever encountered. So he decided to rebuild it.
That became Stedi, founded in 2017. What followed was not a growth-hacked sprint but something closer to a monastic build. Stedi spent about four and a half years constructing infrastructure before it launched anything publicly. Kanter and his team rewrote the entire codebase roughly eight times, throwing away whole systems whenever they proved inadequate. He calls the philosophy "eating glass" - doing the hard thing correctly even when it looks economically irrational.
"Everything's your fault now."
Stedi's first idea was to build a polished interface for retail and logistics EDI. Kanter came to believe that software's near-infinite dimensionality made that approach unscalable, so he changed course. Instead of shipping monolithic features, Stedi would ship composable "Lego-block" APIs and let developers assemble their own solutions.
After the public launch in March 2023, the unexpected traction came from healthcare - the eligibility checks, claims, and electronic payments that flow between providers and insurers. Then, in 2024, a cyberattack knocked Change Healthcare offline for roughly 60 days. An entire industry scrambled for an alternative, and desperate customers flooded to Stedi. Kanter described the surge of demand as "a snake swallowing a deer."
Today Stedi bills itself as an API-first, cloud-native healthcare clearinghouse, processing more than a billion claims and eligibility transactions a year. The March 2026 Series C - $50M led by Addition - drew in Stripe, Ribbit, USV, First Round, BoxGroup, and Bloomberg Beta, plus a roster of founder-angels including Shopify's Tobi Lutke, Vercel's Guillermo Rauch, Ramp's Karim Atiyeh, and Instacart's Max Mullen.
The Production System's insistence that cost savings come from quality, not cost-cutting.
Proof that razor-thin margins can build enormously valuable businesses.
Service-oriented design and a memo-writing culture that outlives any one person.
Identical support for every customer, regardless of contract size.
Starts an auto-parts wholesale business at 16, turning $2,500 into a profitable operation.
Graduates from Rutgers University with a BS in Marketing.
Sells his auto-parts company (Proforged) to Huron Capital after roughly 13 years at the helm.
Founds Stedi to modernize EDI; publishes "Why Amazon is eating the world" on TechCrunch.
Launches Stedi publicly in March after ~4.5 years of building and ~8 rewrites; healthcare traction takes off.
The Change Healthcare outage sends a wave of new customers to Stedi.
Raises a $70M Series B co-led by Stripe and Addition.
Closes a $50M Series C led by Addition - total funding reaches ~$142M.
Kanter draws a hard line between principles, which never bend, and preferences, which can. He hires for "agency" - people who treat their circumstances as within their control - and scales judgment through written decision records rather than gut calls.
"When you have bootstrapped a business, you're saying I'm going to be constrained by capital." The bootstrapper took venture money on purpose.
"Quality, price and speed - you have to pick two. That is the most losing mindset."
He is building a company he intends to run indefinitely - compounding relationships over starting-and-selling cycles.
His entrepreneurial career began at 16 with a single $2,500 stake.
Stedi spent about 4.5 years building before it shipped anything to the public.
The Motley Fool profiled him as an "entrepreneur and futurist" in 2017, when he forecast the impact of autonomous vehicles.
His management thinking blends Toyota, Costco, Walmart, and Amazon into one operating creed.
He still writes essays and notes at zackkanter.com, where "Why Amazon is eating the world" first circulated.
"A snake swallowing a deer."
- describing Stedi's growth during the Change Healthcare outageThe goal is not an exit. Kanter wants to pull cost out of the commoditized transactions that clog healthcare and charge a premium only where Stedi adds real value - and to keep compounding that advantage for as long as he can run the company.