Company leader
Zack Kanter
Founder and CEO
Stedi
Zack Kanter is founder and chief executive of Stedi, a healthcare clearinghouse that software teams use through APIs to check a patient's insurance and send claims. He came to health care from auto parts, where a decades-old file format called EDI frustrated him enough to build his own system and then a company around it.
Selling Auto Parts
In 2010 he founded Proforged, an auto parts brand that sold steering and suspension parts made in Taiwan and China through retailers including O'Reilly Auto Parts and Amazon. By around 2011 orders came in too fast to enter by hand, so he asked his retailers for their API specifications. They all wrote back, he recalled, and "they said what's an API?"
Fighting Through EDI
The retailers ran on X12 EDI, the same file standard health care uses for claims and eligibility. He went through three EDI vendors, the last an 18-month implementation in which everything went wrong. "This is not rocket science," he concluded, and he had his own EDI system built, which ran Proforged for the next five years. Drake Automotive Group, a Huron Capital company, bought Proforged in May 2018.
Building Stedi
He founded Stedi to make EDI work like a modern API. "It took four-and-a-half years for us to launch anything publicly," he said, and the team threw away every line of code maybe eight times along the way.
Stedi later turned to health care. When the 2024 cyberattack on Change Healthcare took that clearinghouse offline, Stedi launched a drop-in replacement for its customers. In August 2025 it raised a $70 million Series B co-led by Stripe and Addition, and a $50 million Series C in March 2026 brought its total funding to $142 million.