Why Middesk's Co-Founder Says Data Access Was Never the Hard Part
Show notes
New Episode Coming June 2
Six hundred fintech companies trust Middesk to verify their customers — and Kyle Mack says the raw data was never the hard part. It's what you do with it next.
In this episode of The Current coming June 2, Finch co-founder Ansel Parikh sits down with Kyle Mack, co-founder and CEO of Middesk, to explore how he built a business identity platform by aggregating data from over 400 government agencies — and why access alone wasn't enough.
Kyle shares how Middesk evolved from simply returning raw data to delivering intelligence and compliance decisions, the role agentic products play in regulated industries, and why the pattern of access-to-intelligence is reshaping how critical business infrastructure gets built.
Listen to this episode to learn:
- How Kyle went from building background checks at Checkr to launching a business identity company, and the "credentialing API" insight that started it all
- The three layers of value in a data business, and why most companies are only scratching the surface
- Where AI is adding value in regulated industries today, and why every industry is on its own adoption curve
- Kyle’s predictions for the future of data intelligence: hyper-contextual, shaped by business model, use case, and who the end customer actually is
- Plus: How Middesk used open-source Medicaid data and reasoning-based intelligence to identify potentially fraudulent clusters across the country in under 30 minutes
Meet the expert
Kyle Mack is the co-founder and CEO of Middesk, the leading business identity platform modernizing business verification, risk evaluation, and compliance. Before founding Middesk, Kyle was the first business hire at Checkr, where he saw firsthand how fragmented and manual business verification was, and realized the problem was big enough to build a company around. Under his leadership, Middesk has evolved from a data-access API into an intelligence platform that synthesizes signals from hundreds of government agencies into actionable compliance decisions.
About The Current
The Current is a bi-monthly podcast that explores the intersection of people, finance, and data, featuring conversations with the operators, builders, and leaders shaping the employment ecosystem.
About the host
Ansel Parikh is the co-founder and COO of Finch, the leading API platform for payroll, HR, and benefits connectivity. He’s spent the last six years building the infrastructure that enables secure, permissioned access to HR and payroll data for a broad ecosystem of software companies serving employers, employees, and service providers.
