Discern

What it is

Discern is a registered agent that works like software. It handles the Secretary of State side of entity management: registered agent service in all 51 US jurisdictions, annual reports, Delaware franchise tax, foreign registrations, and formations. Every entity’s filings, officers, addresses, and documents sit in one record that also feeds the filings. You give it entity names, it pulls the rest from public records, and then it generates, signs, submits, and pays for the filings itself. Discern says it has digitized more than 10,000 distinct US government filings and that most Secretary of State filings finish in under three minutes.

Raj Patel (previously a co-founder of the fintech MANTL), Mike Bosserman, and Simon Moschou launched it in 2024. The company is headquartered in Dover, Delaware. A $4.5M pre-seed led by Walkabout Ventures came in October 2024. On July 29, 2026 it announced a $10M Series A led by Walkabout Ventures and Bungalow Capital, for $17.5M raised in total. At that point Discern reported 800+ clients, 4x ARR growth in 2025, and a customer base that more than doubled in the first five months of 2026. Named customers include Vestwell, Accolade Partners, IA Ventures, Moxie, and White Wolf. Discern also says it powers foreign registrations and multi-state compliance for Stripe Atlas companies. That is separate from the Delaware registered agent Atlas bundles at formation, which Stripe’s own support pages attribute to Legalinc.

The category point matters here. The ooligo catalog carries Athennian, which tracks and governs entities. Discern is on the other side of that line: it is the agent that actually files. The buyer is usually finance rather than legal. Discern says roughly three-quarters of its buyers sit in finance teams, typically a CFO or controller at a fund manager, PE-backed group, or multi-state operator who has found out that something lapsed.

Why it shows up in legal ops stacks

• The filing gets done, not just put on a calendar. Most entity tools remind you that an annual report is due. Discern pre-fills the report from the entity record, submits it, pays the state fee, and stores the evidence on the record. Accolade Partners, a fund of funds, reports cutting compliance project time by 80%.
• Each entity pays from its own account. Fund, SPV, and LP entities can pay their filing fees from their own bank accounts instead of from a management-company card. For fund managers, this removes a monthly reconciliation job and keeps a fund’s costs from ending up on the manager’s books.
• Delaware franchise tax is calculated, not guessed. Discern works out the liability for corporations using the lower of Delaware’s two methods. The default authorized-shares method is the reason founders get five-figure franchise tax notices on a company worth nothing.
• One agent across every state. It replaces a patchwork of agents picked at formation by whichever lawyer or formation service set up each entity. Change-of-agent filings are free, so the cost of switching is your team’s time, not a fee.
• GP chains and org charts come from the same data. People, roles, and addresses update once and flow into both the filings and the org chart. General-partner chains are tracked as relationships between records.

Pricing reality

Discern publishes its price, which is unusual in a category that normally quotes. $350 per state registration per year covers registered agent service, annual report filing, standing and status monitoring, franchise tax alerts, Delaware franchise tax filing, and unlimited users. State fees are passed through at cost. One-off services are priced separately: formations at $99 plus state fees ($249 for professional entities such as PLLCs and PCs), foreign registrations at $99, certificates of good standing at $50, and other filings such as amendments and dissolutions at $149. Portfolios above 50 entities get a custom proposal.

The meter is registrations, not entities. A Delaware holdco qualified in California, New York, and Texas counts as four registrations, or $1,400/year. A 40-entity group averaging three registrations each comes to 120 registrations and a list price of $42,000/year, which is exactly when to ask for the 50+ proposal.

On price, it sits in the middle of the market:

• Harbor Compliance charges $99 for the first year of registered agent service and $159 on renewal, with annual report filing sold separately.
• Filejet lists $150 per entity per state on Standard, $350 on Professional, and $500 on Premium.
• CSC and CT Corporation do not publish rates. Discern’s own comparison puts CSC at roughly $300-500 per state on quote, with filings done as a manual service.

Discern’s pitch is the same price as the incumbents with the filing work included, not a discount.

Best for

CFOs, controllers, and legal ops leads at fund managers, PE portfolio companies, healthcare groups running PCs and PLLCs, and multi-state operators. It fits teams that hold 10-500 US entities across several states, and whose real risk is a lapsed registration found during a financing or a sale. It is the strongest pick when the job is keeping entities in good standing and the governance record (minute books, board consents, cap tables) is already handled somewhere else, or doesn’t need to be.

For one Delaware C-corp with no foreign qualifications, Stripe Atlas’s bundled agent ($100/year after year one) or Harbor Compliance at $159/year is cheaper, and a calendar reminder covers the annual report.

Alternatives and when to pick them

• CT Corporation (Wolters Kluwer) — one of the two century-old incumbents. Patel puts CT and CSC together at roughly 90% of the enterprise market. Pick it when outside counsel already routes litigation service of process through CT and you want one escalation path for lawsuits.
• CSC — the other incumbent, and the pick when you have international subsidiaries. Discern covers only the US, while CSC covers a global footprint under one contract.
• Filejet — the closest direct competitor, and also software-first on filings. Pick it when you want filing automation but plan to keep your current registered agent, or when you are a law firm filing for many clients.
• Harbor Compliance — pick it for fewer than 10 registrations where cost comes first, or for nonprofits that also need charitable-solicitation registrations.
• Athennian — pick it when the job is governance: minute books, structure charts for diligence, UBO tracking, and director and officer appointments across countries. It pairs with Discern; it doesn’t replace it.
• Mosey — pick it when the problem is state payroll and employer-account registrations for remote hires rather than Secretary of State filings.

If none of these fit, the interim is a single registered agent consolidated across every state, a register listing every entity × state registration with an owner and due date, and a quarterly check of good-standing status on each state’s lookup.

Watch-outs

• There are no independent reviews yet. Discern has a G2 profile with zero ratings, and nothing on Capterra or TrustRadius. Every customer outcome on this page comes from Discern’s own case studies and press release. Guard: ask for two reference calls with customers at your entity count and state mix, and pilot one entity family before moving the whole portfolio.
• Switching registered agents puts service of process at risk. While the change is in progress, a lawsuit or a state notice can go to the wrong agent. Guard: move state by state, keep the old agent until each state confirms the change, and test that a sample document reaches the right named contacts and escalation owners before you cancel the old contract.
• It covers the US only. 51 jurisdictions means the 50 states plus DC. Foreign subsidiaries need a separate provider. Guard: count non-US entities before you buy. If they are more than a small share of the register, CSC’s global coverage or a governance tool like Athennian has to sit alongside Discern.
• Governance depth is not documented. The public product pages cover records, people, documents, and org charts. They say nothing about cap tables, board-consent workflows, a public API, SSO, or bulk export. Guard: if entity data has to reach a data warehouse or an AI workspace, or you need a diligence-ready minute book, get the API and export terms in writing. Without them, plan to keep that layer in another tool. There is no MCP server. Background: MCP server explained.
• Part of the original feature set was cut back by regulation. Discern launched with automated FinCEN beneficial-ownership filing. FinCEN’s March 2025 interim final rule exempted US-formed companies from BOI reporting, so that feature now applies mainly to foreign entities registered to do business in the US. Guard: don’t count BOI automation as value unless you hold foreign-formed reporting companies.
• The vendor is two years old, and it holds a statutory role. If a registered agent fails, you have to file a change of agent in every state. Guard: keep your own export of every registration, agent address, and filing receipt each quarter, and check that the contract commits to cooperating with a transfer out.

For where this sits in a wider build, see the mid-market legal ops stack and best AI tools for legal ops.