❓ Problem

Applying for government benefits in America is a paperwork marathon with no finish line. You prove your income, your household and your address for one programme, then repeat the whole routine for the next, and again at renewal. YC's Gustaf Alströmer, who wrote the Winter 2027 request, puts it plainly: every agency runs its own portal, none of them share data, people get rejected over a single missing document, and government workers still check pay stubs by hand.

The cost of that friction is not abstract. During the Medicaid "unwinding", more than 13.3 million people were cut from Medicaid in 2023, with procedural issues cited in just over 70% of cases. Most people lost coverage over forms, not eligibility. When Utah surveyed the people it dropped, 13% said the paperwork was too difficult and 7% said they simply didn't have the documents to prove eligibility.

Here's the kicker: the same broken system that keeps honest people out also lets fraud in. The GAO estimates the federal government loses $233 billion to $521 billion a year to fraud, and AI can now forge a convincing pay stub in seconds. A system built on uploaded PDFs is now a system built on sand.

Meanwhile the main alternative is a toll road. Equifax's The Work Number is the highest-cost income verification option at about $15 per report, and senators have flagged that it raised per-query rates by 126% in Colorado and 120% in Kansas over four years. And it doesn't cover gig workers properly.

✅ Solution

A consent-based verification layer that sits behind existing benefits portals and pulls verified records straight from the source.

• One tap, many records. With the applicant's consent, the platform connects to payroll providers, gig platforms, banks, tax records and residency records, and turns them into one standardised eligibility profile.
• Applicants stay in control. They see exactly what's being shared, approve it, and can add context (like a job that just ended) before anything reaches the agency.
• Agencies get clean data, not shoeboxes. Caseworkers receive a structured report that slots into their existing eligibility system, so there's no new portal for anyone to learn.
• Verify once, reuse everywhere. Once linked, the same profile powers the next application, the SNAP recertification and the six-monthly Medicaid check, with one-click refresh instead of another document hunt.

📊 Key Numbers

Market size

• 73.2 million people were enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP as of June 2026.
• An average of 42.1 million people received SNAP each month in FY2025, though that fell to around 36.6 millionby May 2026.
• From 2027, states will need to gather work and activity data for more than 20 million people in the Medicaid expansion population, and YC notes millions of enrollees must be re-checked every six months.
• The wider category is big: Checkr pegs the identity, workforce, mortgage and tenant verification opportunity at $45 billion.

TAM / SAM / SOM