Minneapolis – September 29, 2026 -- Yardstik, a Minneapolis-based workforce trust platform, has appointed Nick Schneider, President and CEO of cybersecurity firm Arctic Wolf, to its board of directors, weeks after closing a $30 million Series B round led by Harbert Growth Partners.
Schneider brings two decades of cybersecurity scaling experience to Yardstik's board
Schneider has led Arctic Wolf since 2021, growing it into one of the largest privately held cybersecurity companies and a Forbes Cloud 100 and Fortune Cyber 60 honoree. Under his tenure, Arctic Wolf launched the Aurora Agentic SOC and was named a Leader in the 2026 IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Managed Detection and Response Service for Midmarket. He previously ran North American sales at Code42 and held senior sales roles at Compellent Technologies through its IPO and acquisition by Dell.
Funding fuels continuous monitoring beyond the point-of-hire background check
The Series B capital is earmarked for building out fraud prevention, continuous monitoring, and credential tracking across the full worker lifecycle. Yardstik's model checks whether a hired employee's identity and credentials remain valid over time, addressing gaps that a one-time background check cannot catch.
DOJ cases exposed fraudulent remote-worker networks at 236-plus U.S. companies
In June 2025, the Department of Justice dismantled a laptop-farm network that let North Korean operatives pose as remote IT workers using stolen American identities, landing jobs at more than 100 U.S. companies, including several Fortune 500 firms. A second case unsealed later that year linked a five-person facilitator ring to fraudulent placements at 136 additional companies, with some hires subsequently stealing data from employers and attempting extortion.
Insider risk costs organizations $19.5 million annually, per Ponemon research
Ponemon's 2026 research estimates the average cost of insider risk at $19.5 million per organization annually, while Verizon's Data Breach Investigations Report attributes roughly three in ten breaches to insiders. Yardstik positions its platform as covering the workforce as an attack surface that, unlike networks, is typically screened only once at hiring.
Yardstik CEO frames workforce monitoring as the missing layer in enterprise security
"Every attack surface gets watched continuously except one...the workforce,