Founded in 2019 by Rodney Reisdorf, Aaron Santarosa and Ebel, the Buffalo-based company was sold a year ago to iAlta.
Since then, Verivend’s revenue has quadrupled and hiring continues in Buffalo.
Before he cofounded Verivend, Jonathan Ebel was a formative engineering presence at some of Buffalo’s most successful startups, including Liazon Corp. and ACV Auctions.
And before he did those things, the University at Buffalo grad had a comfortable early-career job in IT. One day in late 2010, he ran into Dan Magnuszewski, a friend who lived down the street, who explained that he’d just quit his stable job at Synacor to join a software startup company, My Favorites.
“He told me about this and I thought he was out of his mind,” Ebel said. “To leave your stable job that was paying you well for something that risky.”
Magnuszewski ended up leading the Z80 Labs incubator in the Buffalo News building. He texted Ebel in 2012 to come check it out.
“I didn’t believe Buffalo could be a startup city but I wanted to support my friend and watch him do his thing,” Ebel said. “It changed my life. Seeing all these young people who were excited about their ideas, and other people’s ideas, you could feel the electricity. That was the moment I knew I needed to get involved in the startup world.”
Following successful tenures in engineering management at Liazon and ACV (where Magnuszewski was cofounder and CTO), Ebel joined forces with Rodney Reisdorf and Aaron Santarosa to found Verivend, a payments platform built to enable general and limited partners to seamlessly and securely move funds. The company was officially formed in 2019, received a $500,000 investment from 43North in 2021 and grew steadily over the next four years.
By late 2024, Verivend was facing a choice between raising a large Series A or selling to iAlta, which is led by private equity firm WestCap. The sale to iAlta, announced in February 2025, became one of the notable exits for Buffalo tech companies since ACV’s $3.8 billion IPO in 2021. It allowed Verivend to join forces with a larger organization with significant connections in the financial industry.
The result?
“Revenue had quadrupled,” said Ebel, who like Reisdorf stayed on to grow iAlta. “We have access to much bigger potential customers. More interesting partnerships and opportunities through those customers. And we’re seeing a lot of headcount growth.”
While Verivend had about 15 employees when it was acquired, the new company now has about 100 people in its iAlta Private Markets division. The Buffalo-based headcount has grown by a few, to 10 overall, and Ebel is currently hiring for five more engineering positions that he hopes to draw from Buffalo’s talent pool.
He’s spending a lot of time these days thinking about the energy he felt in Buffalo when his career was beginning. Part of that is advocating for growth in Buffalo at his own organization. Part of it is looking for green shoots of dynamic energy from future changemakers in this city.
“I think Buffalo has a deep and high-quality talent pool, and tech companies can help bring downtown back to life and people back to the office,” he said. “When I talk to founders and startup teams in Buffalo, I still think there is a fire in people’s bellies to do great things. But we need the younger generation to stand up the way we did. If they make themselves known, we’re here to help.”
