The Company That Turned “Prove It” Into a Business

Buying leads on the internet has always felt a little like buying a used car in a parking lot at night. Someone hands you a name and a phone number, swears the person asked to hear from you, and takes your money. Then you call - and find out the person never opted in to anything. Sometimes you find that out in a courtroom. ActiveProspect built a 20-year business on the least sexy fix imaginable: keep the receipt.

The Austin company sells software that does one deceptively simple thing - it records independent, tamper-evident proof that a consumer actually said yes. Its flagship product, TrustedForm, captures how and when someone opted in on a web form, then stores that certificate so a lead buyer can prove it later. Its other engine, LeadConduit, filters and routes those leads in real time, throwing out the bots and duplicates before they ever reach a sales rep. Put together, the two products answer the two questions every lead buyer quietly worries about: is this person real, and did they actually agree to be contacted?

It is not a glamorous pitch. It is a durable one. ActiveProspect now certifies more than a billion leads a year, serves 3,000-plus customers, and, after acquiring Verisk's marketing data unit in late 2025, sits above $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

01 / The originA performance marketer who got tired of garbage

ActiveProspect exists because its founder lived the problem. Steve Rafferty - an engineer by training, with a degree from Tulane and an MBA from Harvard Business School - spent the early 2000s as a performance marketer buying and selling opt-in leads. The experience was maddening: leads arrived unverified, quality was impossible to prove, and there was no neutral record of whether a consumer had consented at all.

So in 2004 he built LeadConduit, a real-time system to capture, filter, enhance and route leads from any source. It was, at first, a plumbing product - the pipes between where a lead was born and where it needed to go. That first product has since processed well over a billion internet leads.

The bigger idea came in 2010. Rafferty launched TrustedForm, the industry's first independent lead certification service. Instead of taking a seller's word that a consumer opted in, TrustedForm sat on the web form itself and recorded the event - the page, the timing, the consent language a visitor actually saw. The insight was subtle but powerful: in a market full of self-interested parties, the most valuable position is the neutral referee. ActiveProspect stopped being just plumbing and became the thing that says, on the record, whether consent happened.

02 / Why it mattersA single wrong call can cost $1,500

To understand why marketers pay for a glorified timestamp, you have to understand the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Under the TCPA, contacting a consumer who did not properly consent can cost between $500 and $1,500 per violation - and violations come in bulk, which is how you get class-action lawsuits with eye-watering totals. For a company dialing or texting thousands of purchased leads a day, “we thought they opted in” is not a defense. “Here is the certificate showing exactly what they agreed to” is.

That is the entire economic engine. ActiveProspect's tagline - “grow your pipeline without the risk” - is really a bet that fear is a renewable resource. As regulators and plaintiffs' lawyers got more aggressive, a nice-to-have compliance tool quietly became a can't-operate-without one.

The market spent 2023 through 2025 living out exactly this drama. The FCC proposed a “one-to-one consent” rule that would have upended how lead generators share consumer consent, set it to take effect in January 2025, then watched courts vacate it after the Eleventh Circuit ruled the agency had overstepped. By August 2025 the prior consent standard was reinstated. Whether the rule lived or died, ActiveProspect's position barely moved - it had spent 20 years making documentation a habit rather than a fire drill.

03 / The toolkitFour products, one job

ActiveProspect is not a single app so much as a stack of decisions that happen in the milliseconds between a form submission and a sales call.

The business model follows the volume. It is B2B SaaS with usage-based pricing - customers pay per lead certified, verified, filtered or routed, with enterprise contracts for the biggest lead buyers and publishers. When you certify a billion leads a year, small per-unit economics add up to a large, sticky business.

04 / The customersInsurance, home services, and the rest of the funnel

The people who need proof of consent are the people who buy leads at scale. ActiveProspect's customers cluster in insurance, home services, financial services, education, legal and media - industries where a lead is worth real money and a compliance mistake is worth even more. Named users include American Standard, Empire Today, Angi, Kohler, Liberty Mutual, LendingTree, Forbes and Unilever. Alongside the 3,000-plus direct customers sit 55,000-plus publishers who certify the leads they generate, feeding the same network of trust.

05 / The moneyPatience, then a $100M jump

ActiveProspect grew for a long time without the usual venture fireworks. It took a growth investment from Five Elms Capital in 2020 and added debt financing in 2022, but it was never a company optimizing for a fast flip. The patience compounded. In December 2025 it acquired Verisk Marketing Solutions - the unit that Verisk had built by combining data firms Infutor and Jornaya - for a reported $80 million. In April 2026 it rebranded that business InfutorData, carving out a dedicated identity-and-data operation alongside its lead-certification core.

The deal did two things at once. It pushed combined annual recurring revenue past $100 million, and it quietly brought Jornaya's consent technology - long a competitor to TrustedForm - under the same roof. Sometimes the cleanest way to win a market is to buy the other side of it.

06 / The moatHow it stays different

Plenty of tools route leads. Plenty of vendors score them. What is rarer is being the trusted third party whose word settles whether consent existed - the record that both buyer and seller, and eventually a regulator, can point to. That neutral-referee position is the moat. Competitors like Phonexa and Boberdoo play in lead management and routing; Jornaya was the closest analogue on certification, and ActiveProspect now owns it. Owning the trust layer beats owning any single transaction, because every transaction has to pass through it.

07 / The takeawayWhat a reader can steal

There is a copyable lesson buried in the plumbing. Most founders chase the front of the funnel - the ads, the landing pages, the growth loops. Rafferty went to the ugly back of it and stayed for two decades: consent, fraud, filtering, documentation. The boring, defensible middle of a messy market is a quiet place to build something durable. The move works when a real cost forces people to keep proof - here, TCPA damages. It works less well where nobody is on the hook, where regulation never bites, or where a giant platform can simply absorb the function. But where the fear is real and renewable, being the company that says “here's the receipt” is a very good place to stand.

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Consent-based marketing · Austin, Texas · Since 2004