Police1’s Spotlight articles introduce the products and services of a valued sponsor in their own words. This article focuses on IDI, a red violet company, whose identity intelligence platform helps law enforcement agencies connect fragmented data, uncover relationships and generate investigative leads in real time. Jonathan McDonald, executive vice president of public sector, provides background on the company.
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What was the inspiration behind starting your company?
Interactive Data, LLC (IDI), a red violet (NASDAQ: RDVT) company, was born from a long history in the identity intelligence and data analytics industry, combined with a goal to modernize how organizations transform raw data into actionable intelligence. Organizations often have vast amounts of data but lack the ability to connect it meaningfully.
IDI was built to address this challenge by:
- Linking fragmented identity data across sources.
- Identifying relationships between people, businesses, assets and locations.
- Turning raw records into intelligence that supports decision-making.
What is your signature product and how does it work?
idiCORE, the most advanced and performant identity intelligence platform on the market, delivers actionable intelligence with:
- Powerful data and unparalleled insights for better decision-making.
- Scalability with automated monitoring, flexible APIs and industry-leading batch processing.
- Leading-edge security that is fully auditable with industry-leading compliance standards.
Leveraging a massive data repository of proprietary, public record and publicly available data covering nearly 100% of the U.S. adult population, IDI’s solutions enable the real-time identification of people, businesses, assets and their interrelationships.
Why do you believe your products are essential to the police community?
IDI helps agencies quickly identify individuals, uncover relationships and generate investigative leads from massive volumes of fragmented data. In environments where time, accuracy and context are critical, these platforms provide intelligence that supports faster and more informed decisions.
Investigators often start with limited information — a phone number, partial name, license plate or address. IDI’s platforms are designed to rapidly expand that starting point by linking data across multiple sources.
Solutions like idiCORE enable investigators to:
- Maintain investigative continuity across desktop and mobile environments, enabling seamless access to intelligence in the field through IDI’s native mobile app.
- Identify individuals and aliases, then connect the dots between relatives, associates and potential accomplices.
- Locate associated addresses and contact information, then map connections between people, businesses, vehicles and properties.
Criminal activity and fraud often involve networks of individuals rather than isolated actors. IDI’s technology uses entity resolution and linking technology to reveal relationships that may not be obvious in traditional databases.
Investigators can uncover:
- Shared addresses, phones or emails.
- Family or associate connections.
- Business affiliations.
- Historical address and identity patterns.
This type of relationship intelligence is critical when investigating organized crime, fraud rings and complex cases involving multiple parties.
What has been the biggest challenge your company has faced?
The biggest challenge IDI has faced is often simply getting public sector agencies to take the time to evaluate our platform and compare it to the legacy systems they have relied on for years. Many agencies operate within long-standing procurement cycles and established vendor relationships, which can make it difficult to create opportunities for meaningful side-by-side comparisons.
Once agencies do take the time to review our capabilities, the reaction is often very positive. They are frequently surprised by how comprehensive our platform is in terms of the breadth of data sources, the way information is organized and presented, and how effectively it performs relative to the legacy — often outdated — systems they have been using.
IDI is also a smaller and more nimble company compared to many of our competitors. That agility tends to benefit our customers, as it allows us to respond quickly to evolving mission needs and pivot them to address new requirements without the delays that can sometimes come with larger, more bureaucratic organizations. As a result, while gaining that initial opportunity to demonstrate the platform can be the biggest hurdle, once agencies engage with our capabilities, they often recognize the advantages of working with a responsive and flexible partner.
What makes your company unique?
IDI combines massive proprietary data assets, advanced entity resolution and a modern cloud-native, AI-embedded platform to deliver a comprehensive and highly connected view of people, businesses and assets. While other providers offer access to records, IDI focuses on turning fragmented data into timely insights and actionable identity intelligence. Our customers tell us that idiCORE shows them where people are now instead of where they were five years ago. Additionally, IDI’s native mobile capabilities extend this intelligence directly into the field, enabling real-time access and continuity between analysts and officers — an area where many legacy providers fall short.
What do your customers like best about you and your products?
IDI delivers superior identity intelligence. In addition to the current, actionable data that our customers get from us, they also appreciate:
- The platform’s ability to surface relationships between people and entities helps to uncover connections that would otherwise remain hidden.
- The platform is fast and intuitive, which is critical for investigators and analysts working under time pressure.
- Map-based search capabilities that allow users to visualize data geographically and reveal investigative insights that are difficult to detect through traditional record searches.
- Investigative continuity between officers in the field, analysts in real time crime centers and external partners when it comes to sharing critical information in real time.
Is there any fun fact or trivia that you’d like to share with our users about you or your company?
Before stepping into the world of public sector leadership, I spent time serving in the United States Marine Corps, where duty sometimes meant standing at the most solemn and historic moments in the nation’s capital. I participated in numerous Honor Guard ceremonies, including funeral services at Arlington National Cemetery, helping pay tribute to fallen service members with the precision and respect those moments demand. Additionally, I had a front-row seat to history, serving on the security detail for President Bill Clinton’s second inauguration in 1997, an experience that combined the discipline of the Corps with the energy of a major national event.
What’s next for your company? Any upcoming new projects or initiatives?
IDI aims to offer the most performant solutions to our Public Sector customers and, consequently, is always considering ways to improve. For example, we are working on additional ways to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning. These initiatives are focused on making it easier and faster for users to extract meaningful insights from our platform, which leverages more than 10,000 data sources and billions of records.
Our goal is to streamline the investigative workflow by enabling more intuitive access to complex identity data, helping customers surface connections, patterns and relevant information more efficiently. We are also continually expanding our platform by adding additional data points to further enhance the depth and quality of information available to our customers.
As these capabilities evolve, they will build on the strength of our existing platform while providing customers new ways to interact with and operationalize the data in support of their missions.
