Middesk: Helping Small Businesses Grow
By Stephanie Zhan and Alfred Lin on behalf of team Sequoia
We first met Middesk co-founders Kyle and Kurt one late afternoon at an industrial bar and bistro in SoMa. It was the best kind of conversation, over drinks and fried chicken, and we were hooked from the start. They shared their experiences working on the background check product Checkr, where they helped companies such as DoorDash, Instacart and Uber understand candidate identity. Inspired, Kyle and Kurt identified a parallel, and increasing, need for companies to understand the identities of other businesses they worked with. The big question was: how do you run a background check on a potential partner or customer? To answer that question, they launched Middesk.
Small businesses are the heart of our economy; there are more than 30 million in the U.S. Yet, many of these businesses struggle to access financial resources including banking, lending and payments — because the companies that provide those services don’t have information on their operating history and reliability. Kyle and Kurt recognized that this information is *the* foundation that allows businesses to quickly establish trust and begin working together. It empowers small businesses to succeed.
As we dug into the space together, the problem was clear: legacy providers use inefficient manual processes, and their data, particularly on small businesses, is often inaccurate. It was also clear to us that Kyle and Kurt were a dynamic pair with a special combination of deep market understanding, technical expertise and product chops. We partnered with them right at the seed, and today we are thrilled to share that Sequoia is leading a $16M Series A.
By building profiles around identity, risk and credit for all businesses — from scratch, the right way — Kyle, Kurt and their team aim to offer the most complete, up-to-date and trusted data in the industry. And by delivering their product in a suite of developer-friendly APIs, they have made accessing that data easier than ever before.
Already, Middesk has data on more than 75 million businesses and serves leading fintech companies including Brex, Plaid and BlueVine, as well as traditional banks and lenders. These companies use the platform to verify and understand their customers and to power compliance, underwriting and fraud decisions. Last year alone, in the throes of the economic challenges of COVID-19, Middesk enabled more than 200,000 small businesses to access financial products including bank accounts, working capital, PPP loans and payment solutions. And now, the team is launching a new product that helps those businesses adapt to the rapid shift toward remote work — by setting up tax accounts in multiple states in minutes.
We’re thrilled to partner even more deeply with Kyle, Kurt and everyone at Middesk on this journey. If you’re interested in joining us, check out the landing page for partnership opportunities and our Careers page for open roles. We believe Middesk is on a path to become the modern identity infrastructure for businesses, and a trusted source of critical data for generations to come!
