From Wall Street's Back Office to Every Founder's Front Door: The Shai Stern Story

Shai Stern: The Master Builder Behind Gotavi — and the Most Trusted Friend in Business Some entrepreneurs build companies. Shai Stern builds relationships — and the companies follow. As the founder and CEO of Gotavi, Stern has taken three decades of hard-won expertise in the machinery of business and distilled it into a single platform. But to understand why thousands of founders, attorneys, and operators trust Gotavi, you first have to understand why they trust Shai Stern. Thirty Years in the "Pipes" of Business Stern's career reads like a history of business infrastructure itself. He began at American Stock Transfer Company, where he was responsible for the outstanding share balances of more than 2,000 publicly held companies and was instrumental in growing the AST Stock Plan — which administered stock option and benefit plans for 500 public companies before its acquisition by Citibank. In 2002, while still in his twenties, he co-founded Vintage Filings, the New York EDGAR filing and financial print firm acquired by PR Newswire in 2007. From there came an extraordinary run: Co-Chairman of Vcorp Services, VStock Transfer, and Vcheck Global, and CEO of CheckAlt, a leader in payments and Check 21 technology. Standing beside him for much of that run has been Seth Farbman, Stern's business partner of more than twenty-five years and one of the most respected figures in the small-cap capital markets. A former securities attorney with a J.D. from Cardozo School of Law and a B.A. from Yeshiva University, Farbman co-founded Vintage Filings with Stern and served as its President as it grew to serve thousands of public companies before its sale to PR Newswire. Together the two went on to build a family of market-defining "V" companies: Farbman was Co-Chairman of Vcorp Services, sold to Wolters Kluwer in 2016; Chairman of Vcheck Global, sold to private equity firm Sunstone Partners in 2021; and remains Chairman and President of VStock Transfer, the transfer agent of choice for pre-IPO, Nasdaq, and NYSE American issuers. With a string of notable exits the Stern-Farbman partnership stands as one of the great serial-founder stories in business services — a quarter-century of trust, shared values, and companies that clients actually love. That partnership endures today, with Farbman championing Stern's newest venture to the founder community he serves. Formations. Compliance. Filings. Transfer agency. Background checks. Payments. For thirty years, Stern hasn't just worked in the value-add services that keep businesses running — he has built and led the market-defining companies in nearly every one of them. The numbers tell the story: 2,000-plus public companies under his care at AST, more than 4,500 public companies served by Vintage Filings, and tens of thousands of clients across the financial, legal, and professional-services sectors through Vcorp, Vcheck, VStock, and CheckAlt. Gotavi: A Lifetime of Expertise, One Platform Gotavi i