[RDVT] Red Violet and the Identity Resolution Mafia
Upcoming posts (in no particular order): IAC/MGM, Gartner, Verisk, Visa/Mastercard, Tractor Supply, Zoetis (maybe)
Today, a quick post on a small company with a colorful origin story.
We don’t often think about the paper trail we leave behind as we move through the world. The DMV records, property deeds, utility bills, corporate filings, liens, and bankruptcy petitions that trace the arc of our lives are stored across a diffuse set of public and private registries. This data is vacuumed up, loaded into a single searchable system, and linked together by companies that, as it turns out, comprise an incestuous micro-industry spawned out of Boca Raton by a cast of characters orbiting around one man: the legendary (or notorious) Hank Asher.
A high school dropout from Indiana, Hank founded a house-painting business in Boca Raton at age 18, sold it in 1982 when it reached $10mn in revenue, and then did what any self-described adrenaline junkie with a pilot’s license living South Florida at the time would have done – smuggle marijuana and cocaine to and from Central and South America, obviously. This supposedly brief 7-week stint never resulted in a conviction and concluded with him working as a DEA informant.
The next decade of Asher’s life through 1992 is shrouded in some mystery. Whatever else Hank was up to during that period, he also developed enough expertise in computing to launch Database Technologies, which ran clusters of PCs in parallel to mine data. Its flagship product, AutoTrack, ingested the records of Florida’s DMV and was widely used by law enforcement agencies and insurers to find people and tie them to assets, claims, and fraud-related clues.
DBT was taken public in 1995 and acquired by ChoicePoint 5 years later for roughly $462mn. ChoicePoint, one of the industry’s key players today, was then purchased by Reed Elsevier, the parent company of LexisNexis, who in order to satisfy the FTC’s concerns of overlapping investigative-data assets, divested CLEAR, a ChoicePoint product that went on to become a notable ID resolution competitor.
By then, Asher was no longer involved. After news of his drug-smuggling past spread through the law enforcement community, the FBI and DEA halted their contracts with DBT in 1999, and Asher was pushed out and forced to sell his stake back to the company for $147mn. He immediately founded a rival data mining firm, Seisint (short for “seismic intelligence”), whose crown jewel, Accurint, competed directly with ChoicePoint. Derek Dubner, now CEO of Red Violet, joined Seisint in 1999 as corporate counsel, and Ole Poulsen – later Red Violet’s Chief Science Officer – was hired as CTO.