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Jon Coss

Executive

Unemployment insurance
Type
Person
Role
Executive
Programs
Unemployment insurance
Updated

The profile

Founder and CEO of Pondera Solutions, a government fraud-detection company acquired by Thomson Reuters in March 2020; California's EDD used its software when it froze 1.1 million unemployment claims.

In the archive

Identity and role

Jon Coss (formally Jonathan Coss) is the founder and former CEO of Pondera Solutions, a fraud-analytics company for government benefits programs. He sold it to Thomson Reuters in March 2020 and stayed on; he was Vice President of Risk, Fraud & Compliance at Thomson Reuters, running the Pondera business unit, a title documented through 2021. He later founded Plum Identity, another government-fraud and identity-verification company, and in June 2026 Plum was acquired by TrackLight. His 2024 business memoir, A Ten-Year Overnight Success, is cited to its retail listing; we do not have a copy.

Biography

Coss's earlier career and his education and 2006 founding of Finish Line Solutions are cited to his company bio; we do not have a copy.

He founded Pondera in 2011 to fight fraud, waste and abuse in government programs (company and acquisition releases) and, by his own account in a Built to Sell interview, grew it to more than $9 million in annual recurring revenue.

The company and its relief role

Pondera sold a cloud-based fraud-detection service for government programs. Its core product, FraudCaster, scores benefits applicants and recipients on their likelihood of fraud, pulling from data brokers, credit bureaus, location data, and government databases and surfacing tiered alerts to investigators; a companion product, CaseTracker, manages the investigations. The programs covered were Medicaid, unemployment insurance, SNAP, tax, and child support. Pondera raised a Series A led by Serent Capital (Serent portfolio page).

Thomson Reuters announced its acquisition of Pondera on March 19, 2020, with terms undisclosed (PR Newswire and GovTech); a podcast interview page puts the price near $124 million.

Pondera's pandemic work for California's EDD is documented by the state's nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office (LAO). In December 2020, EDD hired Pondera, by then part of Thomson Reuters, to review nearly 10 million claims issued during the pandemic but before ID.me came online. EDD and the contractor identified 1.1 million claims as potentially fraudulent, and EDD stopped payment on them without notifying the workers first. The LAO found that more than half of those flagged claims, about 600,000, were ultimately confirmed legitimate. The LAO concluded that the state's use of the tool "adversely impacted the experience of several hundred thousand unemployed workers with legitimate claims" (LAO report).

The company tells the same episode as a win: Thomson Reuters said California used the technology to prevent roughly $60 billion in fraudulent claims (GovTech). By April 2021 Thomson Reuters had productized the approach as "ID Risk Analytics" and said it was analyzing about 30 percent of all US unemployment claims.

Their own relief

No relief located for Pondera: a ProPublica PPP database search (cited) returns only unrelated namesakes, and Pondera was owned by Thomson Reuters from March 2020.

California's LAO found that the EDD screen using the Thomson Reuters/Pondera tool froze 1.1 million claims, of which about 600,000 were later confirmed legitimate — a state budget-analyst finding, not a court judgment. Separately, the Electronic Privacy Information Center's spotlight criticized Pondera's opacity about error rates and quoted Coss estimating that in some states 75 percent of applications to federal programs are "very likely fraud", and EPIC filed a complaint with the FTC against Thomson Reuters (we have a copy of the complaint).

Where they are now (2025–2026)

Pondera continues as part of Thomson Reuters (company pages, cited). By June 2026 Coss was CEO of Plum Identity, which TrackLight acquired (ID Tech Wire); the report names TrackLight CEO Greg Loos; TrackLight co-founder Linda Miller is profiled separately. His LinkedIn profile is cited (self-reported).

Sources held in this archive

Original source documents and archived captures

Sources

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