Palm Launches Comply: Embedded Formation and Compliance for Platforms That Serve Small Businesses

• Enables platforms to turn business formation, Registered Agent, and annual reports into a recurring revenue line, across all 50 states and DC, embedded inside their own experience.
• Payroll, accounting, banking, fintech, vertical SaaS, and marketplaces can now serve a business at the moment it forms, and own every filing that recurs after, instead of handing customers to a third party.
• Get started at getpalm.com

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, business identity network Palm launched Comply, embedded business formation and ongoing compliance. Through one API, any platform that serves a business can form an entity, designate Palm as its Registered Agent, file its annual reports, and keep it in good standing across all 50 states and DC, without the customer ever leaving the partner's product.

Business compliance has always been fragmented across jurisdictions. A business can owe filings across up to 51 separate jurisdictions, each with its own forms, fees, deadlines, and rules that drift over time. Until now, a platform serving that business had two options: route the customer offline to a formation or Registered Agent provider, losing the highest-intent moment in a business's life and every recurring filing after it, or hand-file through state portals and absorb an operational cost it never wanted. Either way, the formation moment and the recurring relationship it begins is no longer inside the product. Palm’s Comply ends that tradeoff.

"We've always believed entity formation is the most underleveraged moment in the customer lifecycle. It's when a business becomes real, and whoever owns that moment owns the relationship that follows. Comply lets our partners own it. Formation, Registered Agent, annual reports, every new state, all inside their product. Once you're there at the beginning and you keep the business in good standing, that relationship just compounds," said Alex Goode, co-founder and CEO of Palm.

One filing, current everywhere it matters

Through one connection, Comply files everything that keeps a partner's customers in good standing: formation, EIN, Registered Agent, annual reports, and RA changes. It files on the business's behalf inside the partner's platform, and writes every result back to the record, so the business stays accurate wherever it shows up.

What makes Comply different is that every filing is also an identity event. Most providers file and move on. Comply uses the filing: each formation, renewal, and report updates ownership, operating status, and jurisdiction on the same verified record, so nothing drifts out of sync.

"Most providers read a registry, file a form, and move on. We built something different," said Helen Steinhauser, Head of Operations at Palm. "When Comply files, the business, the state, and the partner's product all update at once, and the partner owns that relationship from day one. No one else can do that."

Built for platforms businesses already run on

The applications extend across every category that serves a business. Payroll and HRIS platforms can put formation on day zero of onboarding and attach payroll the moment the entity exists. Accounting platforms can form the entity and keep it in good standing every year, inside the product that already handles the tax. SMB banks and fintechs can make formation step one of onboarding and bank the business the same day. Vertical SaaS providers can become the system of record the business is actually run from, not just a workflow. Marketplaces can bind the seller at incorporation and file in every new state they expand into.

The revenue compounds. Registered Agent renews every year. Annual reports recur. Every new state a customer enters adds more filings. What starts as a single formation becomes a line that grows on its own, captured only in-product with Palm.

Palm provides Registered Agent in partnership with established, nationwide providers. Palm owns the API, the identity record, the service levels, and the partner relationship.

Availability

Comply is available today at getpalm.com. Teams can create a developer account, access the full documentation, and walk the formation and compliance lifecycle against their own onboarding flow. For partnership inquiries, visit getpalm.com.

About Palm

Palm is the business identity network, the identity fabric that connects platforms, businesses, and government to verified business data across every jurisdiction. Palm reads and writes to government systems of record: by API where they exist, direct connections where they do not, and people on the ground in government buildings where neither does. One verified business identity, bound to the record, kept current in real time, portable across every partner, vendor, and agency a business has to prove itself to. More than 125 million businesses in the United States and Canada are on the Palm network today. Learn more at getpalm.com.