Yaacov Tarko

Yaacov Tarko is co-founder and chief technology officer of Commenda, a global entity and tax compliance platform with teams in San Francisco, California, and Bengaluru, India. He grew up in the Modern Orthodox Jewish community of Los Angeles, California, studied computer science at UCLA and worked as a software engineer at Google before starting Commenda with Spencer Schneier, its chief executive.

Studying at UCLA

Before college he spent a year studying at Yeshivat Orayta in Jerusalem, according to his contributor note for Ha'Am, UCLA's Jewish newsmagazine. He arrived at the University of California, Los Angeles, planning to study political science and human biology, and wrote for Ha'Am on religion and campus life, including a 2016 essay titled “Thinking scientifically about religion”. He finished at UCLA in 2018 with a computer science degree, according to his career history on The Org.

Joining Google

While still a student he interned at Tyvak Nanosatellite Systems in 2017, building account-based authorization for a satellite ground station, and at Facebook in 2018, where he worked on memory use and network systems for its location-aware distribution team. He joined Google as a software engineer in 2019.

Starting Commenda in India

In 2021 Schneier came back from a trip to Mumbai and Bengaluru with an idea for a tool that would help companies register and stay compliant in other countries, and an early-stage investor offered $100,000 to pursue it. Schneier later told Business Insider that he convinced his co-founder to leave his job at Google and that the two moved to Bengaluru without an explicit plan. Tarko has been chief technology officer of Commenda since April 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile.

In 2023 much of Commenda's work was helping Indian startups that needed an American parent company. Writing on Hacker News in June 2023, Tarko said Commenda helped “Indian startups get set up with RBI-compliant, venture-ready Delaware c-corps,” meaning structures that meet the rules of the Reserve Bank of India. He gave two reasons founders wanted them: “American VCs love investing in Indian startups, but they hate investing in Indian corporations,” and a US company and bank account make it easier to sell to US customers.

Running Engineering and Security at Commenda

Tarko built Commenda's engineering team from the start and also runs its security program without a dedicated security hire, according to a 2026 case study by ZeroPath, a company that sells AI code scanning. While Commenda prepared for SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001, two security certifications that enterprise customers ask vendors for, ZeroPath's scanner caught an authorization flaw in a pull request that could have given users access they should not have had. “That's not something any pre-LLM tool could catch,” he said in the study. He reviews the findings each week and routes them to engineers, which takes him a couple of hours.

In June 2026 Commenda announced a $9 million seed round led by Pelion Venture Partners and Bling Capital. The company said it had helped more than 500 companies expand overseas and could incorporate entities in 74 countries.