The software many public companies use to file their SEC reports came out of Ames, Iowa. Workiva, first called WebFilings, sold cloud software for the reports public companies must file with the SEC. Finance teams used it to pull numbers from many spreadsheets into one document, update them everywhere at once and tag the data for the regulator. Several of its founders had already taken a software company public in the 1990s.

Second Time Around in Iowa

WebFilings was formed in 2008. Matt Rizai, Marty Vanderploeg and Jeff Trom were among its founders, and members of the team had earlier built Engineering Animation. The SEC was about to require companies to tag their financial data in a format called XBRL. WebFilings bet that finance teams would want one shared, online workspace to handle it instead of emailing files back and forth before every deadline.

A Quiet Debut

The company renamed itself Workiva in 2014. It priced its IPO at $14 a share in December 2014, the middle of its range, and raised about $101 million on the New York Stock Exchange as WK. The stock slipped 1.8 percent on its first day. Workiva later added tools for audit, risk and sustainability reporting. It remains public on the NYSE.

Cover: The Cornfield, David Lucas. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a cornfield (Ames, Iowa).