The background check has always been a one-time gate, and Yardstik just raised $30 million on the argument that it should be a permanent one.

The Minneapolis company said on August 27 that it had closed a $30 million Series B led by Harbert Growth Partners, with Rally Ventures, MissionOG, Crosslink Capital, Grotech Ventures and Great North Ventures all taking part. Valuation was not disclosed. The round brings Yardstik to $65 million raised since it was founded in 2020. Chief executive Andrew Johnson has run the company since October 2024, when he stepped up from chief operating officer and took over from co-founder Matt Meents, who remains on the board.

What the company does

Yardstik sells what it calls a Human Trust Platform: identity verification, criminal and motor vehicle record checks, and credential monitoring, delivered through a REST API that drops into whatever HR stack a customer already runs. The product distinction it is selling is time. A conventional screen is a photograph taken the week someone is hired, and Yardstik's position is that risk keeps moving after the shutter closes. The system tries to catch synthetic and stolen identities before a check is even ordered, then keeps running quietly in the background, raising an alert when a commercial driver's license lapses, an insurance policy expires or a new record appears. Its customer list clusters where workforces are dispersed and churn is high — Gopuff, TaskRabbit, Liveops, Sharetown and HUNGRY, spanning gig work, staffing, healthcare, logistics and childcare.

The numbers behind the round

Yardstik put roughly $35 million on its balance sheet before this round, so the Series B nearly doubles the capital behind it. The company reports 149 percent revenue growth over the past year, 98 percent account retention across three years and a 99.4 percent customer satisfaction score. Those figures are company-supplied and unaudited, and no revenue base is attached to the growth rate, which is the usual caveat at this stage. One operating number is more telling than the growth curve: at Liveops, Yardstik flags between 10 and 15 percent of applicants as some kind of risk. That is the size of the problem the company is pricing against.

Why the timing matters

Remote hiring made it normal to onboard someone nobody has met, and generative tools have made a convincing forged credential or a fabricated identity cheap to produce. The screening industry, built for in-person hiring and annual compliance cycles, is not structured to notice when a worker who passed in January stops qualifying in June. Yardstik says the money will go toward exactly those gaps: expanded fraud detection, ongoing motor vehicle report monitoring, OIG exclusion monitoring for firms billing Medicare and Medicaid, and automated alerts on expiring licenses, insurance and certifications. It is a bet that continuous monitoring becomes a compliance requirement rather than a premium tier — and, less comfortably, a bet that employers are willing to keep a standing eye on staff they have already hired.

Source

SiliconANGLE — "Workplace fraud monitoring startup Yardstik raises $30M to help employers keep tabs on their staff"