The Top Kansas City Startups: A Founder’s Field Guide to the Companies Built Here

I have started four companies, and two of them were built right here in Kansas City. VinSolutions, the auto-dealer software company I co-founded in 2006, sold to Cox Automotive in 2011. Stackify, the developer tools company I started in 2012, was acquired in 2021. So when I talk about the Kansas City startup scene, I am not writing as an observer. I am writing as someone who raised money here, hired engineers here, and sold companies here.

That is also why this list bugs me when other people write it. Most “top startups in Kansas City” articles are a quick directory pulled from a database. They miss the thing that makes this city interesting, which is that Kansas City has been quietly producing real companies for a hundred years, and most people have no idea.

So I put together the version I wish existed, and it covers four kinds of company. First, the newest names worth watching. Then the companies raising real money right now. Then the ones that grew up and got acquired or went public. And finally, my favorite, the big tech names you would never guess started here. Every company links out to its own site, and every funding number here comes from public reporting, not guesswork.

Let’s start with the newest names.

Startups to watch

These are the youngest companies on the list. Every one of them has real press coverage behind it, not just a database listing, because traction is the only reason to put a young company on a list like this. I have grouped them loosely by how much proof is on the table today. Some of these will be gone in two years. That is how this works, and it is exactly why “to watch” is the honest label.

Funded, with early traction

CarePilot builds an AI-native interface that automates the documentation work doctors hate, and raised a $2.5 million seed round in 2025 backed by Mucker Capital and KCRise Fund. It even got a shoutout at OpenAI’s developer day.

Roz automates compliance and audit work, finding documentation gaps and pulling the evidence automatically. It has raised about $2.15 million and landed a Fortune 100 pilot.

Rebulk (formerly dScribe AI) got into Y Combinator and has since pivoted to using computer vision to track bulk-material inventory for industrial and supply-chain customers. It raised a $1.2 million pre-seed in 2025.

Veeper stops affiliate fraud and coupon-code leaks for e-commerce brands, with customers like Cozy Earth and Tommy John, and has raised a $1.7 million pre-seed.

Hilltop Technologies brings affordable threat-detection cybersecurity to small businesses that normally cannot afford it. It has raised angel funding and won a LaunchKC grant.

IncumbentFI gives banks and credit unions a no-code way to add programmable payments and card controls, with a Fiserv partnership behind it. It has raised several million dollars and pitched at InvestMidwest 2026.

Noonan, from Albatross Golf in Lenexa, is an AI “digital caddie” that turns your shot data into club and aim recommendations, and it integrates with Garmin devices. It raised a $675,000 seed round in 2024.

Storytailor uses AI to create personalized children’s stories, and has leaned into bibliotherapy, helping kids ages 3 to 8 work through their emotions. It has been through Techstars and won a LaunchKC grant.

CodeAlgo Academy turns learning to code into a game for K-8 students, so a kid can pick up Python without a teacher guiding every step. It has raised over $100,000 and won LaunchKC backing.

Lotus TMS builds cloud transportation-management software for intermodal and drayage trucking. It is bootstrapped and came up through LaunchKC.

The Good Game is an on-demand marketplace that connects families with verified youth-sports coaches, and it already powers platforms for KU Athletics and the NAIA.

LAN Party is a virtual 3D social and gaming platform, on Steam, that recreates the feel of an in-person LAN party. It has raised around $2 million.

Earning their first attention

Archia is building what it calls an operating system for AI agents, a compliance-ready runtime that lets companies build and deploy agents across providers through one API. It is early, backed by Digital Sandbox KC, and worth watching as every company tries to figure out how to put agents into production.

Block and Mortar is building an AI platform for the early, messy pre-construction phase of real-estate development, and just took a strategic investment from two Kansas City construction firms.

BuildNest out of Olathe is building AI cost-estimation tools for new-home construction.

Ask Samie connects older adults and people with disabilities to occupational-therapist-approved home modifications and adaptive equipment, and was selected for a Techstars accelerator with a $220,000 investment.

Authentiya, a University of Kansas spinout, gives teachers visibility into how students are using AI, which is a problem every school is grappling with right now.

Resonus is a govtech platform that connects residents to their local government, and recently took an equity investment from the Missouri Technology Corporation’s IDEA Fund.

Valor is building AI-guided cancer-care navigation to help families manage the logistics of treatment. It joined the 2026 LaunchKC cohort.

Kete builds AI data infrastructure for independent financial advisors, and SiteScan uses AI to inspect municipal sewer systems. Both earned early backing from Digital Sandbox KC.

Cybership builds affordable, modern warehouse-management software for third-party logistics providers and brands, with a Shopify app. It won a LaunchKC grant.

Who’s getting funded right now

Here are the Kansas City companies that have raised real, recent rounds. If you want to know where the momentum is, follow the money. You will also notice two local investors, Flyover Capital and KCRise Fund, show up again and again. They are the backbone of a lot of these deals. I have ordered these roughly by the size of the round, from a nine-figure war chest down to first institutional checks.

Lead Bank is a Kansas City bank that turned itself into the banking infrastructure behind fintech names like Affirm, Ramp, and Stripe. In 2025 it raised a $70 million Series B, led by ICONIQ and Greycroft, at a valuation reported around $1.47 billion. It is the biggest recent raise on this list.

Steadily sells landlord and rental-property insurance through a tech-driven platform out of Overland Park. It raised a $30 million Series C in April 2025 at a reported $355 million valuation, led by Two Sigma Ventures.

Lula is a property-maintenance platform that connects property managers with a vetted contractor network and scheduling software. The Kansas City company raised a $28 million Series A in February 2025 led by PeakSpan Capital, and has since reported reaching profitability.

Companion Protect out of Leawood builds pet insurance and wellness programs that insurers and retailers can offer under their own brands. It added a $20.25 million Series A extension in 2024, on top of an earlier $27 million round.

benefitbay builds software that lets employers offer individual-market health coverage to their teams through an ICHRA model. It raised an $18 million Series A in 2026 led by Ten Coves Capital.

Daupler uses AI to manage real-time incident response for utilities and municipalities, the kind of thing that matters when a water main breaks at 2 a.m. It raised a $15 million Series B in March 2025 led by Aqualateral.

Novel Capital is an Overland Park fintech that offers revenue-based financing to B2B software companies, growth money that does not cost the founders their ownership. It raised a $15 million pre-Series A in 2024, co-led by IGNIA Partners and Ulu Ventures.

Trially uses AI to match and enroll patients into clinical trials, pulling signal out of messy medical records. It raised a $4.7 million seed round in September 2025 led by Kansas City’s own Flyover Capital.

Attane Health runs a “food as medicine” platform that delivers groceries and nutrition coaching to people on Medicaid and employer health plans. It has raised around $4 million, backed by investors including KCRise Fund and Acumen America.

Invary is a cybersecurity company spun out of the University of Kansas, built on technology licensed from the NSA, that checks whether an operating system has been tampered with while it is running. It raised a $3.5 million seed round in early 2025.

Ideem makes two-factor authentication invisible for mobile payments using cryptographic device-binding. It raised a $2.4 million seed round in 2025, led by Sovereign’s Capital. Its founder, Toby Rush, is the same person who built EyeVerify, so this is his second act in the same city.

Foresight is a fintech using AI to assess credit risk so lenders can extend small-business loans to borrowers who would otherwise get passed over. It is based in Kansas City, Kansas and has pulled together roughly $2 million through a mix of grants and early investment. It is not the New York fintech of the same name.

Loom Security out of Lawrence builds an AI-native platform that pulls security risk signals across identity, devices, and networks into a single view. It has raised early funding, with about $1.85 million reported in a 2024 filing.

Transportant builds a “smart bus” platform for school districts, with GPS, live cameras, ridership tracking, and a parent app. It raised an early round in 2025.

VinCue builds inventory management and digital retailing software for used-car dealers, out of downtown Kansas City. There is a nice piece of Kansas City lineage here: founder Chris Hoke ran software development at VinSolutions, the company I co-founded, before he started VinCue in 2015. It raised its first institutional round, a Series B led by Holman, in 2023. The amount was not disclosed.

The graduates: Kansas City startups that made it big

These are the companies that started small here and grew into real exits or public companies. This is the proof that the city produces winners, not just hopefuls. The single biggest one, Cerner, you will find further down in the tech-names list, but it is nowhere close to alone.

NIC Inc. was a pioneer of digital government services, building the official websites and online payment portals for states across the country, all run out of Olathe. It traded publicly for years before Tyler Technologies bought it in 2021 for about $2.3 billion, reportedly the largest acquisition in Tyler’s history.

DST Systems processed financial records at enormous scale from its Kansas City headquarters for decades. SS&C Technologies acquired it in 2018 for roughly $5.4 billion. It now runs as SS&C DST.

C2FO is a working-capital marketplace founded in Leawood in 2008 by Sandy Kemper. It grew into one of the city’s true tech unicorns, with hundreds of millions raised from investors including SoftBank’s Vision Fund. It is still private and still here.

PayIt builds the digital platform that lets residents pay taxes, renew their DMV registration, and handle other government services from their phone. Founded in Kansas City in 2013, it took a growth investment of more than $100 million from Insight Partners in 2019 and now serves over 100 million residents across North America.

EyeVerify is one of my favorite Kansas City tech stories. Founded here in 2012, it built biometric authentication that verified your identity by reading the vein patterns in the whites of your eyes. In 2016 it became Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial’s first US acquisition. The price was never officially disclosed, though it was widely reported at around $100 million. It now operates as Zoloz inside one of the world’s largest payment platforms.

BacklotCars built an app-based wholesale marketplace for car dealers to buy and sell used inventory. Founded in Kansas City around 2015, it sold to KAR Global for $425 million in 2020 and is now part of OPENLANE.

Perceptive Software built enterprise content management software out of Shawnee, Kansas. Lexmark acquired it for $280 million in 2010.

DEG grew from an Overland Park digital agency founded in 1999 into a national digital-commerce shop. Dentsu acquired it in 2018 in a deal reported to be worth around $150 million. It now operates as part of Merkle.

VinSolutions is one of my own, so I will be upfront about that. I co-founded it in Kansas City in 2006 to help car dealers manage their inventory and customers, and we sold it to Cox Automotive’s AutoTrader in 2011 for around $150 million. It still operates as a Cox Automotive brand today.

Stackify is the other one I built. I founded it in Leawood in 2012 to give developers better tools for monitoring and debugging their applications, and Netreo acquired it in 2021. I put both on the list because I lived them, and because I want founders here to know that building and selling a company from Kansas City is not a fluke. It is a pattern.

Big tech names you didn’t know are from Kansas City

This is my favorite part, because almost nobody gets these right. None of these are startups anymore. They are household names whose Kansas City roots most people have completely forgotten.

Cerner. One of the largest electronic health records companies in the world was started in Kansas City in 1979 by three colleagues, reportedly sketched out on a picnic table in Loose Park. For years it was one of Kansas City’s largest private employers, and it shaped how hospitals across the country run, before Oracle bought it in 2022 for $28.3 billion. It operates today as Oracle Health. Most people have no idea a company that central to American healthcare came from here.

Garmin. The GPS and smartwatch company most people assume is from California or Asia was founded in Lenexa, Kansas in 1989, originally under the name ProNav. It has run its operations out of Olathe since 1996. Today it does billions in revenue, and it is still a Kansas company at heart.

Sprint. For decades, one of the largest wireless carriers in the country ran out of a sprawling campus in Overland Park, Kansas. Sprint is part of T-Mobile now, but the company that put a phone in millions of pockets was a Kansas City operation. Its roots actually trace back to a small Kansas telephone company from 1899, though Overland Park was its home for the modern wireless era.

H&R Block. Most people know the tax-prep brand. Fewer know it was founded in Kansas City in 1955 by Henry and Richard Bloch, or that it grew into one of the biggest consumer tax-software companies in the country, going head to head with TurboTax every spring. The “Block” in the name is the brothers’ last name, spelled differently so people would say it right.

VML. One of the biggest digital and marketing agencies in the world, now part of WPP with tens of thousands of employees, started in 1992 as a small Kansas City shop named after its three founders.

Black & Veatch. A global engineering firm founded in Kansas City in 1915 that most people outside the industry have never heard of, even though it builds the power, water, and data-center infrastructure the tech industry runs on. As the AI boom drives a wave of data-center construction, a hundred-year-old Kansas City company is quietly in the middle of it.

I will throw in one more that is not a tech company but explains a lot about why this list exists. Marion Laboratories, a pharmaceutical company that grew past a billion dollars in sales, was started in Kansas City in 1950 by Ewing Kauffman, working out of his basement. Kauffman used that fortune to launch the Kauffman Foundation, which has been funding and mentoring Kansas City entrepreneurs ever since. A lot of the startups higher up this list can trace a line back to money and ideas that started with one guy in a basement.

Why Kansas City keeps doing this

Here is what I have learned after building two companies here and watching dozens of others do the same. Kansas City has a real cost advantage, a deep bench of engineering talent coming out of schools like KU and Missouri S&T, and a tight investor community where Flyover Capital, KCRise Fund, and the Kauffman Foundation actually know each other and work together.

It does not have the hype of the coasts, and honestly that is part of why the companies here tend to get built to last instead of built to flip.

Full Scale, the company I run now, is a Kansas City company too. We help companies build software teams, and we are part of this same community of founders who decided you do not have to be in San Francisco to build something that matters. If you are building here, or thinking about it, I would love to hear about it.

If your company is on this list, congratulations. You earned it. And if I missed you, that is on me, so tell me and I will take a look. This list is going to keep growing.