Zack Kanter

Founder & CEO Stedi

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Zack Kanter founded Stedi to rebuild the plumbing of American healthcare administration, and he came to it as a customer rather than a technologist. Before Stedi he built and bootstrapped an aftermarket auto parts brand, manufacturing in Taiwan and China and selling through O’Reilly Auto Parts and Amazon — a profitable business he eventually sold to private equity. What he took from it was a specific grievance: the electronic data interchange standards that large retailers required of their suppliers were, in his description, the most complicated problem he had ever encountered, and the software built to handle them was uniformly bad. Stedi is his answer, now narrowed to one of the highest-stakes applications of EDI in the US economy. It operates as an API-first healthcare clearinghouse, connecting providers to more than 3,400 payers and processing over a billion transactions a year, in direct competition with legacy clearinghouses whose batch-oriented architecture Kanter argues is fundamentally incompatible with an ecosystem being rebuilt around AI. The company has raised $142 million from Addition, Stripe, Union Square Ventures, Ribbit Capital and others, and runs fully distributed with around 125 people.

Career Highlights

• Founded Stedi in 2017 and leads it as Chief Executive Officer.
• Rebuilt healthcare EDI as a cloud-native, API-first clearinghouse, connecting to more than 3,400 US payers and processing over one billion transactions annually.
• Raised $142 million in total, including a $70 million Series B co-led by Stripe and Addition and a $50 million Series C led by Addition announced on 30 March 2026.
• Previously founded and ran Proforged, a bootstrapped and highly profitable aftermarket auto parts brand manufactured in Taiwan and China, sold through O’Reilly Auto Parts and Amazon, and later acquired by Huron Capital.
• Built Stedi as a fully distributed company of around 125 engineers and product staff, on the argument that requiring in-person work removes most of the candidate pool.
• Writes publicly on company building at zackkanter.com, including a widely circulated 2015 essay on autonomous vehicles and employment.

Professional Journey

Kanter’s first business had nothing to do with software. He built a brand of aftermarket automotive parts, Proforged, manufacturing in Taiwan and China and selling into US retail — O’Reilly Auto Parts, Amazon and others. It was bootstrapped and, by his own account, unusually profitable. Selling into large retailers meant complying with their electronic data interchange requirements, and it was there, around 2011, that he hit the problem that would define the rest of his career: EDI is a set of decades-old standards, the tooling around it is expensive and brittle, and nobody had rebuilt it for the API era. He sold Proforged to Huron Capital, which placed it with its Drake Automotive Group platform.

Stedi began in 2017 as an attack on that problem in general. The founding premise was that B2B transaction exchange — purchase orders, invoices, shipping notices, claims — should be programmable infrastructure rather than a consulting engagement, and that a developer should be able to integrate against it the way they would against a payments API. Early backers included Bloomberg Beta, First Round Capital, Union Square Ventures and BoxGroup.

The decisive move was narrowing. Rather than remaining a horizontal EDI platform, Stedi focused on healthcare, where EDI volumes are enormous, the transaction types are federally mandated, and the incumbent clearinghouses are among the least-loved infrastructure in American medicine. Stedi became a clearinghouse itself, connecting providers to more than 3,400 US payers for eligibility checks, claims and remittances, and processing over a billion transactions a year. Kanter’s public argument for the approach is architectural rather than commercial: legacy clearinghouses were designed around batch files and human intervention, and that design cannot support an ecosystem in which AI agents initiate and reconcile transactions. Reliable transaction processing, in his framing, has to be programmable.

Investors have backed that thesis heavily. A $70 million Series B was co-led by Stripe and Addition, an unusual pairing that signalled how close Stedi’s problem sits to payments infrastructure. On 30 March 2026 the company announced a $50 million Series C led by Addition, with Stripe, Union Square Ventures, Ribbit Capital, First Round Capital, BoxGroup and Bloomberg Beta participating, bringing total funding to $142 million.

Kanter runs the company as a fully distributed organisation of roughly 125 people, with employee clusters in New York but no conventional headquarters, and he is based in the Bay Area himself. He is direct about the reasoning — requiring in-person work, he has said, eliminates 99% of the potential hiring pool. He writes regularly at zackkanter.com on company building, and is still best known outside his industry for a 2015 essay arguing that autonomous vehicles would eliminate millions of driving jobs, published years before the claim became conventional.

Education

No education was found in any public source for Zack Kanter. His own about page, his long-form podcast interviews and the 2026 funding coverage are all silent on his academic background, and none is asserted here.