Stedi is making EDI less terrible

Zack Kanter built and sold an auto parts company before starting Stedi. In the auto parts business, every company has a database that knows how much inventory they have and what parts fit which cars. And then there's this bizarre telephone-game layer of EDI—Electronic Data Interchange—where everyone's talking to everyone else in formats designed in the 1970s.

Zack describes EDI as the original API. Before JSON, before REST, before the internet, EDI was how businesses exchanged structured data. It's the language of supply chains: purchase orders, invoices, shipping notifications. Trillions of dollars flow through EDI messages every year. And it's almost completely invisible.

The surprisingly large market

When Zack first started exploring EDI, he couldn't believe no one had built modern infrastructure for it. Every e-commerce company, every retailer, every distributor touches EDI when they work with supply chain partners. Walmart, Amazon, Target—they all speak EDI.

The market is enormous and under-served. The incumbent solutions are mainframe-era relics. The big EDI vendors are optimized for a world where changing anything takes months. Modern companies want APIs, webhooks, real-time updates. Stedi gives them that.

Why now

Two things changed. First, developer expectations. Engineers who grew up with Stripe and Twilio expect clean APIs and great documentation. When they encounter EDI for the first time, they're horrified. They want modern tooling.

Second, commerce is fragmenting. More brands are selling direct-to-consumer but also through marketplaces and retail partners. More marketplaces are connecting more sellers to more buyers. Every new connection is potentially a new EDI integration.

Stedi's goal is to make EDI as easy as any other API integration. You shouldn't need a consultant. You shouldn't need six months. You should be able to read the docs, write some code, and go live.

Building for AWS

Stedi is built entirely on AWS, and Zack is a genuine fan. He loves Lambda—the simplicity of "here's a function, run it when I need it" still feels magical. He loves how AWS lets you scale without thinking about servers.

At re:Invent, he's excited about the infrastructure talks. Like many technical founders, he's drawn to the sessions where AWS engineers explain how they actually built things. The tradeoffs, the edge cases, the war stories. That's where the real learning happens.

This interview was conducted at AWS re:Invent 2025.