Middesk Expands Enterprise Banking Push as KYB Verification Volumes Grow

Middesk processed 2.5 million business verification checks last year, up from 1 million in 2022, according to reporting by Forbes. The San Francisco-based startup, which raised $80 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Accel, and Insight Partners, carries a $760 million valuation and is expanding its footprint deeper into regulated financial institutions.

Founded in 2018 out of Y Combinator’s W19 batch, the company provides automated Know Your Business (KYB) and business identity infrastructure. Rather than relying entirely on third-party aggregators, Middesk connects directly to primary sources, pulling records from secretary of state offices across all 50 U.S. states, as well as county registries and federal databases. In March 2026, FinTech Magazine ranked Middesk among the top ten regulatory technology vendors globally, pointing to its direct-to-source data model as a mechanism that allows financial platforms to compress multi-week business onboarding workflows down to seconds.

Building Direct Data Pipelines for Business Identity

Traditional business onboarding at commercial banks suffers from high drop-off rates. As co-founder and CEO Kyle Mack told Banking Dive, banks evaluating business applicants through legacy data providers often approve only 10% to 20% upfront, sending the remaining 80% to 90% into manual document-request queues where prospective clients routinely abandon applications. Mack noted that "there are a lot of good businesses put through the ringer of having to really prove [legitimacy] largely because the infrastructure to help a bank understand who that customer is has just been really bad."

To solve the data quality gap, Middesk systematically aggregates fragmented municipal and state records. In some cases, Mack explained, gathering baseline government records required shipping physical hard drives to state agencies to load datasets by hand. The company now combines real-time artificial intelligence agents to pull state filings with an internal data operations team of roughly 35 employees who track down updates in jurisdictions that do not publish daily digital feeds.

On top of this ingestion pipeline, Middesk runs its core API products for KYB verification, entity resolution, beneficial ownership screening, continuous monitoring, and tax registrations. Products like Signal score inbound applicants to assess legitimacy and fraud risk before accounts are opened. The company’s core technology stack is built using React, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Apache Airflow, Google Cloud Dataflow, Elasticsearch, Kubernetes, and Google Cloud Platform.

Leadership from Background Verification

Middesk was founded by Kyle Mack and Kurt Ruppel, both of whom previously worked at Checkr, an employment background check platform.

Mack, who serves as CEO, holds a BA in Economics from Concordia University and previously worked as a director at Checkr and an executive at AnyPerk. CTO Ruppel holds a BA in cognitive science from the University of California, Berkeley, and served as an engineering manager at Checkr after working as a senior software engineer at Zendesk.

Their operational background in automating consumer identity checks directly shaped Middesk's approach to entity identity. The founders identified that while consumer background screening had evolved into automated API workflows, commercial counterparty verification remained tied to slow, manual database lookups.

Commercial Expansion and Enterprise Adoption

Middesk's client base has expanded to 600 customers, including Mercury, Bluevine, Plaid, Rippling, and Novo, as well as two of the three largest U.S. banks and more than 100 regional banks and credit unions.

To support institutional sales, Middesk has pursued integrations with core banking vendors. In early 2025, the company announced an integration with digital origination platform Attune to support commercial loan and deposit account onboarding. Commercial outreach has also leaned heavily on direct institutional acquisition: Event Marketer reported that a targeted campaign at the Money20/20 trade show secured 160 pre-booked meetings with target enterprise accounts, yielding an 85% completion rate and ten times the activation cost in direct pipeline.

Hiring Priorities

Middesk currently lists 12 open roles, primarily divided between its San Francisco headquarters and its New York office. The active requisitions point to two clear operational priorities: building out enterprise sales capacity in New York and expanding core modeling and data engineering capabilities.

On the revenue side, the company is recruiting heavily for East Coast sales professionals to serve financial institutions, with openings for an Enterprise Account Executive and an Account Manager, Enterprise Banking. These enterprise roles offer compensation packages reaching up to $340,000.

On the engineering and data side, the team is hiring hybrid technical roles across San Francisco and New York. Openings such as Lead Data Scientist ($210,000 to $250,000) and Software Engineer, Infrastructure ($148,000 to $230,000) reflect an emphasis on strengthening entity resolution algorithms, scaling data extraction, and supporting backend dataflow architectures.

Open Roles at Middesk

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