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Search - Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Intelius - Profile

HQ: Bellevue, WA

Founded: January 2003

Management: CEO and Chairman is the inimitable Naveen Jain, Microsoft veteran, InfoSpace founder, and dot-com era billionaire. InfoSpace wasn't keen on Naveen starting Intelius - he was sued (unsuccessfully) for violating a non-compete clause.

Investors: Bootstraped as far as we know. Naveen despises blood-sucking VCs.

Business Model: Purveyor of every manner of information: criminal records, court documents, addresses, background checks, etc. Access to this information ranges in price from a one-time search ($7.95) to a 24-hour pass ($19.95) to a variety of higher price points depending on the breadth of the information requested. Pretty basic model: you have questions, we have answers, but you're going to have to pay for them. Company also offers an identity management system to block identity theft and and software to organize homeland security data.

Competitors: Free databases at your local library, SuperPages.com (Verizon), Acxiom, Bigfoot.com, WorldPages, infoUSA

Dirt: As an aggregator of information that is mostly available for free in other places, you'd think Intelius would have a hard sell. But are you really going spend the time to figure out the labyrinth of publicly available information databases? Key to this business is offering convenience of access all in one tidy place. And if we know Naveen (indeed, we do know Naveen), there is some nice technology layered on top of all these databases to patch the information together in a convenient manner.