Modern Registered Agent service, Beneficial Ownership and Secretary of State filing automation from a technology company – implemented in minutes
Discern, the Compliance Operating System, announced it closed a $4.5M pre-seed round led by Walkabout Ventures, with participation from 30+ founders, operators, and friends. Discern takes annual time spent on entity management down to minutes, by providing Registered Agent service, automating secretary of state and beneficial ownership filings, tracking franchise taxes, and offering simple digital formations and foreign registrations.
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Despite only launching earlier this year, Discern has over 100 customers including Modern Treasury, Vestwell, Bluestone Lane, IA Ventures, Moxie, Small Door Veterinary, and has been growing 23% per month and accelerating in Q3.
“With Discern, companies can automatically track and file their secretary of state filings, get digital Registered Agent service, and report Beneficial Ownership information to FinCEN,” said Mike Bosserman, Co-founder of Discern. “The last thing CFOs and General Counsels want to spend time on is managing their legal entities. With Discern’s automation tools, they can spend minutes a year and have more accurate filings.”
Having a Registered Agent is a legal requirement, but Registered Agent companies today still rely on email and physical mail to serve their customers. As an example, the two companies responsible for 70% of Delaware formations are each over 125 years old.
The lack of software tools means companies are chronically out of compliance with the states they’re registered in. It’s virtually impossible to manually track the myriad of filing requirements and dates at even the state level, let alone actually complete the filings.
Even the requirements can be tricky to track down. State law may differ from information available on Secretary of State websites, which may differ from the actual filings themselves, which may differ from what examiners accept. Discern’s product supports over 3,500 unique filings types across all jurisdictions in the United States.
“We are both a happy investor and customer of Discern because entity management and compliance is a compulsory part of running any business and the existing vendors offer nothing beyond a stack of mailed invoices every year,” said Josh Diamond, Partner at Walkabout Ventures. “Discern streamlines this process and gives customers the peace of mind that their entities are compliant, wherever they are based.”
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