Naveen Jain, the Indian-born founder of InfoSpace, now has a new company. He established his latest company, Intelius, in 2003, sometime after leaving CEO duties at InfoSpace.
Intelius largely makes money from performing background reports, criminal reports and intelligences in behalf of companies and consumers. The intelligences are designed to verify information concerning persons, including their addresses, telephone numbers, criminal history, professional licenses, marriages, properties, and more. Intelius sources them from public repositories of information such as courthouses, department of corrections, government offices, and directories.
Hence, Intelius marks a departure from InfoSpace, which largely dealt with website content like stock quotes, maps, horoscopes, and weather forecasts, and packaged them for top clientele like America Online, Lycos, Netscape, Disney, Wall Street Journal, and MSN. Naveen Jain was in fact the manager at MSN, Microsoft’s online service, around the time of its 1995 debut. He built InfoSpace the year after.
Three years to its debut, Intelius got the top American Business Award for a new company in 2006. Revenue-wise, Intelius has been sailing smoothly from the outset. Today, Intelius is among the biggest private companies not only in the Puget Sound area, but also the entire North American continent.
During his time with InfoSpace, Naveen Jain became known for his audacious promise to bring the Internet to everyone’s cell phones. This gesture prompted the media to style him as an innovator at par with Bill Gates. In 1997, Information Week speculated that Jain would be one of the “6 Who Will Change The Net.”
That last one may be fodder for dispute, but one thing’s certain: Naveen Jain has financially come a long way. In 2000, Forbes Magazine placed Jain, who had a worth of $2.2 billion, on its yearly ranking of the 400 Richest Americans. In fact, Jain is an accomplished philanthropist, as any rich American is wont to be.
