red violet knows who’s calling. That is the business.

The phone rings. Someone wants to see a house. Before the agent has met the caller, before there is a handshake or a walk through an empty property, there is a number on a screen. It is an ordinary beginning to a working day. It is also the beginning of red violet’s most easily understood product.

A stranger, a number, a decision

FOREWARN lets a professional begin a lookup with as little as an incoming phone number. Its app can surface identity information and records concerning criminal history, property, and financial matters. For a real estate agent, the attraction is practical: gather information before the meeting rather than discover it during one. A showing has enough uncertainties already. The wallpaper need not be the least alarming.

This is a useful way into red violet, a company whose larger business is harder to picture. The parent builds identity intelligence: software and data that help organizations understand people, businesses, assets, and the connections between them. IDI, its other principal brand, brings those capabilities into investigations, due diligence, fraud prevention, and recovery work. Two different customers can arrive at the same underlying technology with quite different questions.

A SMALL INPUTOne number.
More context.

A professional lookup before a face-to-face meeting.

Official product illustration

The difficult art of joining the dots

A record is rarely a complete portrait. It may contain an address, a name, a phone number, or an asset. Another source contains something else. A person moves. A business changes. Similar names create ambiguity. Collecting these fragments is one task; deciding how they belong together is another. The latter is where identity intelligence earns its fee.

red violet’s underlying platform is called CORE. The company describes it as cloud-native, with machine learning built into its data processing. Its purpose is to fuse public records, proprietary material, and publicly available information into connected views. An identity graph is the resulting map of entities and relationships. Think of it as an address book that remembers connections, rather than a drawer full of unrelated calling cards.

idiCORE is the investigative window into this system. It offers an online interface, APIs, and batch processing, allowing a human researcher and an automated business process to use the same capability in different ways. IDI also advertises security certifications including SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001. Such credentials matter when the raw material concerns real people and the customer is an organization with obligations of its own.

Other products move closer to particular tasks. coreIDENTITY offers verification, KYC and KYB tools, application pre-fill, fraud signals, and monitoring. idiMARKETING connects online and offline identifiers for audience work and data enrichment. Here the same problem appears in a less dramatic costume: a business wants to recognize its customer across disconnected records without treating each fragment as a new person.

The company competes in a market occupied by LexisNexis, TransUnion, and Thomson Reuters. Its argument for choosing it rests on its data assets, matching technology, cloud architecture, and integration options. Those are company claims, rather than a universal verdict on accuracy. A buyer should judge the output against its own cases. A beautiful map is of little use if it sends your investigator to the wrong door.

A young company with an older address book

The dates tell two stories. Red Violet, Inc. was formed in 2017 and emerged from Cogint’s risk management business in March 2018. The operating history reaches further back: the company’s investor materials date IDI’s roots to October 2014 and development of its cloud platform to January 2015. The public-company birthday therefore understates the time spent assembling the business.

Derek Dubner, chairman and chief executive, has led red violet since inception. His career includes legal roles at TLO, TransUnion, Equifax, and Seisint. That background provides an unusually relevant kind of experience. In a business built from personal data, understanding contracts, permitted uses, and the history of the market belongs near the product, rather than somewhere down the corridor.

The technical expertise has its own texture. Chief technology officer Angus Macnab holds a doctorate in computational physics and has worked in scientific computing. His company biography credits him with designing substantial portions of red violet’s data fusion and matching capabilities. Identity analytics requires people who can make sense of a messy record, and people who can make that process run repeatedly at scale.

Sell the moment, then sell the workflow

FOREWARN’s distribution is almost as interesting as its lookup. REALTOR associations can contract for the service and make it available to members. That puts the product inside a relationship that already exists. A professional organization gains a concrete member benefit; the software supplier gains a route to professionals who might otherwise need to discover and purchase the app one at a time.

By the end of June 2026, 660 REALTOR associations were contracted for FOREWARN. In September, the company announced an agreement with the Pacific West Association of REALTORS to serve more than 10,000 members. The product page also carries association testimonials about providing access without an additional member charge. Somebody still pays. The purchasing unit has simply changed.

IDI sells into a wider set of professional problems. Its published use cases include finding debtors, locating witnesses and heirs, investigating fraud, and identifying assets. In these settings, the value of the service is the time and effort a customer can avoid while pursuing an authorized task. An API can place the lookup inside existing software; batch processing can handle a list rather than require a person to repeat the same search.

There is a transferable product idea here. Start with the action a customer already needs to perform. Make that action easier to complete. Then offer ways to use the capability more often, or across more of the organization. red violet describes its sales approach as a trial followed by an initial purchase and expansion into additional departments and use cases. The opportunity grows with useful work.

The bill behind the lookup

Such convenience takes capital. red violet raised $7.5 million through an equity offering in 2019 and another $21 million in November 2021. The latter brought approximately $20.9 million in net proceeds and involved no investment banker. Management said the money would support data science, cloud architecture, sales, and expansion in selected markets. The business needed both machinery and customers.

“We will increase investment in the data science behind our machine learning powered platform”

Derek Dubner / November 2021 financing announcement

The economics become clearer as usage grows. In its 2019 reporting, red violet explained that much of its data cost followed flat-fee, unlimited-usage arrangements. More customer activity could therefore spread an existing data bill across more revenue. This does not make another lookup free: infrastructure, staff, and continued development still require money. It explains why a growing customer base can change the shape of the income statement.

Revenue reached $90.3 million in 2025. By Q2 2026, quarterly revenue was $26.7 million and GAAP net income was $5 million. An August public offering then supplied approximately $109 million net, intended for general corporate purposes and possible strategic acquisitions. Raising that money established capacity to act; it did not, by itself, establish what any acquisition would accomplish.

What the record cannot decide

The limits are part of understanding the product. FOREWARN’s terms prohibit using its services to determine eligibility for credit, insurance, employment, or housing. They also disclaim guarantees of accuracy and currentness. A professional safety lookup and a regulated eligibility decision carry different requirements. The distinction belongs in the buying decision before anyone begins typing names.

Nor does identity context predict everything about an encounter. A matching record gives a professional information to consider, not certainty about a person’s intentions. The useful application is to improve preparation within an appropriate workflow. It will disappoint a buyer who expects a comprehensive verdict on character, or who needs a purpose the product’s terms exclude.

That brings the story back to the ringing phone. red violet’s appeal is easy to understand when information arrives early enough to change a practical decision. Its larger challenge is to make those connections dependable, usable, and worth paying for repeatedly. The caller has a number. The company has built a business around what a professional can responsibly learn from it.