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Dan Stevens

Executive

PPP
Type
Person
Role
Executive
Programs
PPP
Updated

The profile

Founder of Kickbox, a Dallas email-verification company used in Womply's PPP application flow; Kickbox took a $186,400 PPP loan from Harmony Bank that SBA data mark paid in full.

Identity and role

Dan Stevens (Daniel H. Stevens) founded Kickbox, the email-verification service, and ran it as chief executive. Kickbox checks whether an email address is real and deliverable before a sender uses it: it catches typos, flags risky or disposable addresses, and reduces the bounce rates that wreck a sender's reputation. The legal entity is Kickbox, Inc., and through the relevant years its headquarters was at 2030 Main Street, Suite 500, in Dallas, Texas.

Stevens's title is documented in the company's own materials: a 2017 PRWeb release calls him "Kickbox CEO & Founder Dan Stevens", and Kickbox's archived 2019 about page lists him as CEO; a 2019 Business Wire release is cited via ChannelBiz; we do not have a copy.

Kickbox was a separate company from Sendwithus, the Y Combinator email startup that later became Dyspatch (TechCrunch and Dyspatch captures); the only documented link between the two is a 2016 co-marketing webinar (SlideShare capture). Kickbox's own about pages name no parent company.

Biography

The biographical record on Stevens is thin: his education is cited to Crunchbase , and his employers before Kickbox are not documented in the sources we have.

Kickbox launched as an email-verification service in 2014 (archived kickbox.io); its product centered on a deliverability score it called Sendex. Its archived 2019 about page shows an independent company based in Dallas with a London office.

There is no long-form founder interview in the record.

The company and its PPP role

Kickbox sold one narrow thing: email verification. Womply's complaint against Benworth says its Technology Platform "checked the validity of an applicant-provided email address using third-party application Kickbox" (OTO Analytics (Womply) Complaint, No. 3:23-cv-01034).

A verified, deliverable email is a contact channel a lender or the government can use later, and it is a data point for spotting fraud networks: the same address or a suspicious pattern of addresses showing up across many applications. Kickbox did not make credit decisions, set eligibility rules, score loans, or collect an agent fee.

Their own relief

Kickbox took a PPP loan of its own: the SBA's loan-level data (cited; row not reproduced here) lists Kickbox, Inc. at its Dallas address with a $186,400 loan from Harmony Bank, marked paid in full. The row carries a martial-arts-gym industry code, and the Dallas address is what ties it to the email-verification vendor.

No regulatory enforcement against Kickbox or Stevens (no SEC, FTC, CFPB, or SBA inspector-general action) appears in the public record, and neither is named in the House PPP-fraud report. No litigation involving the email-verification company or Stevens was located.

Where they are now (2025–2026)

Kickbox was acquired by J2 Global in 2020 (Mailtrap roundup); Kickbox's site footer now identifies it as a product of J2 Martech Corp, a Ziff Davis company. Its archived 2025 about page lists a New York address and a different senior team.

Where Stevens is now is not independently confirmed; his current employer and title could not be verified from the sources we have.

Sources held in this archive

Original source documents and archived captures

Sources

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