Business description of RED-VIOLET-INC from last 10-k form

RED VIOLET , INC.

TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR FORM 10-K

Item 1. Business.

This business description should be read in conjunction with our audited consolidated financial statements and accompanying notes thereto appearing elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2018 (the “2018 Form 10-K”), which are incorporated herein by this reference.

Company Overview

Red Violet, Inc. (“we,” “us,” “our,” “red violet,” or the “Company”), a Delaware corporation, is a software and services company specializing in big data analysis, providing cloud-based, mission-critical solutions to enterprises in a variety of industries. red violet’s mission is to transform data into intelligence utilizing our proprietary technology platform to solve complex problems for our clients. Harnessing the power of data fusion and powerful analytics, we transform data into intelligence, in a fast and efficient manner, so our clients can spend their time on what matters most -- running their organizations with confidence. Through our intelligent platform, CORE^TM, we uncover the relevance of disparate data points utilizing our analytical capabilities to provide real-time and insightful views of people, businesses, assets and their interrelationships. We empower clients across markets and industries to better execute all aspects of their business, from managing risk, identifying fraud and abuse, and ensuring legislative compliance, to debt recovery.

We provide unique and compelling solutions essential to the daily workflow of organizations within both the public and private sectors. Our cloud-based data fusion platform, combined with our massive database consisting of public-record, proprietary and publicly-available data, as well as a unique repository of self-reported information on millions of consumers, enables the delivery of differentiated products and solutions used for a variety of essential functions. These essential functions include identification and authentication, and investigation and validation.

Leveraging leading-edge technology, proprietary algorithms, and massive datasets, and through intuitive and powerful analytical applications, we provide solutions to organizations within the risk management industry. CORE is our next generation data fusion platform, providing mission-critical information about individuals, businesses and assets to a variety of markets and industries. Through machine learning and advanced analytics, we use the power of data fusion to ingest and analyze data at a massive scale. The derived information from the data fusion process ultimately serves to generate unique solutions for banking and financial services companies, insurance companies, healthcare companies, law enforcement and government, the collection industry, law firms, retail, telecommunications companies, corporate security and investigative firms.

Built in a secure payment card industry (“PCI”) compliant environment, our cloud-based next generation technology delivers greater than four 9s of service uptime. By leveraging our proprietary infrastructure design within the cloud, we currently operate in datacenters across the U.S. and are able to dynamically and seamlessly scale as needed. Using our intelligent framework, and leveraging a microservices architecture where appropriate, we reduce operational cost and complexity, thus delivering superior performance at greatly reduced costs compared to traditional datacenter architectures. Since the release of our CORE platform in May 2016, we have added billions of data records and continue to add over a billion records per month on average. Our average query response time for a comprehensive profile is less than 250 milliseconds versus competitive platforms that measure comprehensive profile response times in seconds.

On March 26, 2018, Fluent, Inc. (“Fluent”), formerly known as Cogint, Inc. (“cogint”), a Delaware corporation, completed a spin-off (the “Spin-off”) of its risk management business from its digital marketing business by way of a distribution of all the shares of common stock of Fluent’s wholly-owned subsidiary, red violet, to Fluent’s stockholders of record as of March 19, 2018 (the “Record Date”) and certain warrant holders. The distribution occurred by way of a pro rata stock distribution to such common stock and warrant holders, each of whom received one share of red violet’s common stock for every 7.5 shares of Fluent’s common stock held on the Record Date or to which they were entitled to under their warrants, which resulted in a distribution of a total of 10,266,613 shares of red violet common stock. Upon the Spin-off, red violet owns Fluent subsidiaries which previously operated Fluent’s risk management business.

As a result of the Spin-off, red violet is an independent public company and red violet’s common stock began regular-way trading on The NASDAQ Capital Market under the symbol “RDVT” on March 27, 2018.

From inception of our risk management business in September 2014 through December 2016, the majority of our operations were dedicated to the early-stage development of our business model, including the development of our proprietary, cloud-based technology platform, CORE, and the buildout of our initial-phase suite of products, powered by CORE, to serve a variety of industries within risk management. Beginning January 2017, with our technology platform production ready and hardened, our initial suite of products released into the marketplace, and a multi-year product roadmap defined, we transformed from a development organization to a sales-driven organization with sales increasing from a $5.8 million annual run-rate for the month ended January 31, 2017 to a $18.6 million annual run-rate for the month ended December 31, 2018.

For the years ended December 31, 2018 and 2017, we had revenue of $16.3 million and $8.6 million, net loss of $6.9 million and $21.5 million, and adjusted EBITDA of negative $4.3 million and negative $8.3 million, respectively. For periods prior to the Spin-off, all the financial information of red violet referred to red violet and Fluent subsidiaries that previously operated Fluent’s risk management business. For periods prior to the Spin-off, the Company’s financial statements were prepared on a consolidated and combined basis because certain of the entities were under common control. All intercompany accounts and transactions have been eliminated between the consolidated and combined entities. Adjusted EBITDA is a non-GAAP financial measure equal to net loss, the most directly comparable financial measure based on US GAAP, excluding interest income, net, depreciation and amortization, share-based compensation expense, litigation costs, insurance proceeds in relation to settled litigation, transition service income, and write-off of long-lived assets and others, as noted in the tables included in “Use and Reconciliation of Non-GAAP Financial Measures” of Item 7, “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations.”

Our Markets

The target market for our products and solutions today consists primarily of organizations within the risk management industry.

The big data and analytics sector continues to grow at an accelerated pace due to the proliferation of data generated over the past two decades from both traditional and emerging sources, including e-commerce, mobile and social media. International Data Corporation, a global provider of market intelligence and advisory services, estimates that worldwide revenue for big data and business analytics services is expected to reach $260.0 billion in the year 2022, representing a compound annual growth rate (“CAGR”) of 11.9% from 2017 through 2022. Continued, rapid innovation and adoption of new technologies presents enormous challenges for organizations of all types to sort through this sea of data to glean actionable intelligence and address their mission-critical business functions. These challenges serve as key drivers of the sector’s growth. Our industry-agnostic platform, solutions, and analytical capabilities are designed to solve the myriad of complex problems that organizations face on a daily basis.

Risk management and fraud analytics has become increasingly important not only in the banking and financial services sectors but across multiple other industries and use cases. According to the market research company MarketsAndMarkets, the risk analytics software market is projected to grow to $35.9 billion by 2022, representing CAGR of 15.3% from 2017 through 2022, with North America estimated to hold the largest market share in the risk analytics market. Data fusion analytics and the information derived therefrom is now the primary service product for risk management associated with key purchasers such as banking and financial services companies, insurance companies, healthcare companies, law enforcement and government, collection agencies, law firms, retail, telecommunications companies and investigative firms. Primary use cases include, but are not limited to, obtaining information on consumers, businesses and assets (and their interrelationships) to facilitate the location of individuals and assets, identity verification, legislative compliance and to support criminal, legal, financial, insurance, and corporate investigations, due diligence and the assessment and mitigation of counterparty risk.

Key Challenges Facing our Customers

We believe our products and solutions address the challenges that the industry faces today, which include:

Actionable Big Data Insights Through A Single Platform— As the velocity and volume of data continues to grow exponentially, enterprises have become overwhelmed with data and their inability to glean intelligence from such data to derive successful business decisions in real-time. Customers demand full-suite, turn-key solutions that are agile, flexible, and available on-demand in order to gain the speed, scale and insight necessary to drive their business models. As the breadth and depth of data increases, providers will need to deploy new technologies that enable both the ingestion of data at massive scale in real-time, irrespective of structure or form, and the analytics components necessary to function across multiple channels. The continued digitization of human interactions, and the corresponding availability of the data resulting therefrom, is driving demand for data capture, management and analysis software. As a result, customers are looking for flexible and efficient solutions to fuse disparate sets of not only transactional data but also demographic, ethnographic and behavioral data as well, in order to provide insights that are truly actionable.

Cost and Performance Pressures—As our customers face constant cost pressures, they need to continually improve the value they receive from their information solutions. Whether it is right-party contact, managing risk, skip tracing or regulatory compliance, customers are increasingly more sophisticated, requiring enhanced performance that provides fast, accurate, and cost-effective solutions to satisfy their business objectives. Improving performance can mean delivering the right data at the right time, or providing the most intuitive information as rapidly as possible to capitalize on opportunities or reduce risk. Superior data fusion with unique data sources delivers customers an advantage as they cope with these pressures.

Delivering Solutions for Complex Problems Using Scalable Data Analytics—The larger and more complex a data repository, the more difficult it is to provide sustained levels of performance and insight. The highly-fragmented nature of data across multiple mediums, proliferation of data and lack of robust technology limits the ability to aggregate actionable information into a comprehensive view. There is an inherent need for information solutions that allow businesses to leverage data that provides actionable intelligence to support debt recovery, fraud detection and prevention, investigations, due diligence, identity verification, and legislative compliance in a more efficient manner.

Our Competitive Strengths

We believe our leading-edge technology platform, massive database of consumer profiles, and dynamic and intuitive solutions deliver superior capabilities to our customers. Our solutions enable our customers to make more informed inquiries regarding their problems and better decisions to solve their most complex problems. We believe the following competitive strengths will continue to deliver an unrivaled value proposition that further drives our differentiation:

Transformative and Innovative Technology Platform—Through the power of our platform, CORE, we offer a comprehensive suite of information solutions. Our cloud-based, data and industry agnostic platform allows us to assimilate, structure, and fuse billions of disparate records to create comprehensive profiles of individuals and to present these insights in real-time via analytical applications. We believe our platform’s speed, power, and scalability are key differentiators in the marketplace.

Massive Database of Holistic Consumer Profiles—Data is the lifeblood of our technology platform. We leverage our CORE platform to build massive proprietary datasets and apply analytics in real-time to provide actionable insights. Our data is compiled from a myriad of online and offline sources, both structured and unstructured, including public record, publicly-available, proprietary, and self-reported data. Public record data includes personally identifiable information, as well as property, identity, bankruptcy, lien, judgment, automotive, phone and other information aggregated from companies specializing in data aggregation, public record repositories, and publicly-available sources. Proprietary data includes data internally generated by proprietary algorithms and analytic processes. Through next-generation technology and proprietary algorithms, we efficiently ingest these datasets, structure them into normalized form, and utilize the process of data fusion to resolve unique identities so as to create an actionable, real-time view of the data for various use cases, delivering greater intelligence to our customers and enhancing their decision-making capabilities across all markets and industries.

Our Platform and Solutions

Leveraging leading-edge technology, proprietary algorithms, and massive datasets, and through intuitive and powerful analytics, we provide industry-agnostic analytical solutions for organizations within the risk management industry. These organizations use our services to perform due diligence, collect debt, verify consumer identities, investigate fraud and abuse, mitigate risk, and locate assets, among other things. Our core capabilities and technology platform allow us to serve a broad and diverse set of industries and to solve a wide range of issues facing organizations daily.