Pomegra
Minneapolis-based Yardstik closes a $30M Series B led by Harbert Growth Partners, pushing total capital to $65M as its continuous post-hire screening platform grows revenue 149% year-over-year.
- Harbert Growth Partners led the round; Rally Ventures, MissionOG, Crosslink Capital, Grotech Ventures, and Great North Ventures all participated.
- Yardstik's platform auto-enrolls workers in post-hire monitoring and surfaces coordinated fraud signals across an entire employer's workforce in real time.
- New capital will fund motor vehicle record monitoring, OIG exclusion checks, and automated alerts when licenses or certifications expire.
Lead
Yardstik, a Minneapolis startup that sells what it calls a human trust platform for employers, raised $30 million in a Series B round announced August 27, 2026. Harbert Growth Partners led the financing. Existing backers Rally Ventures, MissionOG, Crosslink Capital, Grotech Ventures, and Great North Ventures joined. The close brings total capital raised to $65 million and arrives as the company reports 149% year-over-year revenue growth and a 98% account retention rate over the past three years - metrics that positioned the round well ahead of a difficult fundraising environment for enterprise SaaS.
What Does Yardstik Actually Do?
The company started as a background check vendor but has repositioned around a specific gap: most employers screen workers once at the point of hire, then stop. Yardstik's Continuous Monitoring product auto-enrolls screened workers into ongoing post-hire surveillance, catching events that would go undetected between hiring cycles - a professional license that lapses, a subsequent criminal conviction, or an Office of Inspector General exclusion that would bar someone from federally funded healthcare programs.
Its Fraud Insights dashboard goes further. Rather than evaluating each applicant in isolation, the system aggregates signals across an employer's full applicant pool, surfacing patterns such as Social Security numbers appearing across multiple applications, device geography anomalies, and payment card issuance locations that cluster in ways inconsistent with claimed identities. The design targets coordinated or systematic fraud rings, not just individual misrepresentation.
Customers include Gopuff, TaskRabbit, Liveops, Sharetown, and HUNGRY - gig marketplace operators and staffing intermediaries whose contractor-heavy models expose them to identity and credential fraud at scale. Yardstik also serves healthcare, transportation, logistics, and childcare operators where license status is a compliance and liability matter, not just a preference.
Why Is Post-Hire Monitoring a Growth Market Now?
The background check industry has long sold employers on pre-hire screening. The pitch for continuous monitoring is that the point of hire is increasingly not the point of risk. Gig platforms onboard workers at volume and maintain large, lightly supervised rosters. Healthcare networks deploy contractors across facilities with minimal direct oversight. Fraudulent identities or expired credentials can persist undetected for months after initial screening clears them.
OIG exclusion monitoring illustrates the stakes for healthcare clients. A worker placed on the OIG's exclusion list after hire - for fraud, abuse, or a criminal conviction - cannot legally be compensated under Medicare or Medicaid programs. Employers who miss the exclusion and continue paying that worker face civil monetary penalties. Manual monitoring processes, dependent on periodic manual checks, leave gaps that can span months. Automated enrollment closes those gaps.
Motor vehicle record monitoring adds a parallel use case for transportation and delivery operators. A driving violation or license suspension that occurs after a driver's initial background check creates both safety and liability exposure that pre-hire screening cannot catch.
What Does This Round Signal About Yardstik's Valuation?
The company did not disclose valuation. The $30 million Series B following an undisclosed Series A implies meaningful up-round pricing given the revenue trajectory, but Yardstik's leadership has offered no confirmation. The participation of five existing investors alongside the new lead suggests those earlier backers saw adequate markup to justify following on - though in the current market, insider-heavy rounds can reflect a tight external market as much as conviction.
Harbert Growth Partners, the Birmingham, Alabama-based growth equity firm, has been active in SaaS and technology-enabled services. Their lead here signals a view that workforce compliance automation has durable enterprise value independent of AI hype cycles - a more grounded thesis than most recent SaaS fundraising narratives.
What Comes Next for the Platform?
The company plans to deploy the new capital primarily into product expansion. Motor vehicle record monitoring and OIG exclusion screening - currently offered in limited form - will be built out as full continuous monitoring products. Automated alerts for license, insurance, and certification expirations are also in development, closing a gap that currently forces compliance teams to manage credential renewal calendars manually.
Geographic and vertical expansion are the implied longer-term levers. Yardstik's current customer base skews toward US-based gig and staffing operators, but the OIG use case is inherently healthcare-specific and points toward deeper penetration of hospital systems and home health agencies - buyers with larger contracts and higher compliance budgets than gig platforms.
Outlook
Yardstik's $30 million round reflects genuine market momentum: a 149% revenue growth rate is hard to manufacture, and a 98% retention rate across three years suggests the product addresses a real, recurring need rather than a one-time compliance purchase. The open question is competitive durability. Established background screening vendors - Sterling, First Advantage, and HireRight among them - have the customer relationships and compliance infrastructure to build continuous monitoring products of their own. Yardstik's differentiation rests on integrating fraud-signal aggregation with credential monitoring in a single dashboard. Whether that product lead persists as larger incumbents move down-market will determine whether the next raise reflects a category leader or a niche player.
