# Zack Kanter

> 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.

- **Role:** Founder & CEO at Stedi
- **Organizations:** Stedi, Proforged
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** BS, Marketing, Rutgers University
- **Known for:** Founded and scaled Stedi into an API-first healthcare clearinghouse processing over a billion claims and eligibility transactions per year., Raised roughly $142M total across Series B and Series C rounds with backers including Stripe, Addition, USV, Ribbit, First Round, BoxGroup and Bloomberg Beta., Bootstrapped an auto-parts business from $2,500 to a profitable exit to Huron Capital.

## Career timeline

- **~2004** — Starts an auto-parts wholesale business at age 16, turning $2,500 into a profitable operation.
- **2007** — Graduates from Rutgers University with a BS in Marketing.
- **2016** — Sells his auto-parts company (Proforged) to Huron Capital / Drake Automotive Group after running it for roughly 13 years.
- **2017** — Founds Stedi to modernize EDI (electronic data interchange); publishes the widely read essay 'Why Amazon is eating the world' on TechCrunch.
- **2023** — Launches Stedi publicly in March after roughly 4.5 years of building and about eight full codebase rewrites; finds strong traction in healthcare.
- **2024** — Change Healthcare cyberattack drives a surge of desperate customers to Stedi during a 60-day industry outage.
- **2025** — Raises a $70M Series B co-led by Stripe and Addition.
- **2026** — Raises a $50M Series C led by Addition (March), bringing total funding to about $142M; Stedi processes over a billion claims and eligibility transactions annually.

## Achievements

- Founded and scaled Stedi into an API-first healthcare clearinghouse processing over a billion claims and eligibility transactions per year.
- Raised roughly $142M total across Series B and Series C rounds with backers including Stripe, Addition, USV, Ribbit, First Round, BoxGroup and Bloomberg Beta.
- Bootstrapped an auto-parts business from $2,500 to a profitable exit to Huron Capital.
- Wrote 'Why Amazon is eating the world,' one of the most-shared business essays of 2017.
- Grew Stedi's paying customers 6x and billed transactions 7x year over year.

## Latest updates

- **2026-03** — Announced Stedi's $50M Series C led by Addition, bringing total funding to about $142M, with participation from Stripe, Ribbit, USV, First Round, BoxGroup and Bloomberg Beta plus angels including Tobi Lutke, Guillermo Rauch, Karim Atiyeh, Max Mullen and Jack Altman.
- **2026-03** — Reported Stedi now processes more than a billion claims and eligibility transactions annually, with paying customers up 6x and billed transactions up 7x year over year.

## Links

- Website: https://zackkanter.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zkanter
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/zackkanter

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/zack-kanter
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-07-22