Can you explain what Intelligo does and how it differs from the companies people think of when they hear the term “background checks”?
When people hear “background checks,” they typically think about employment screening; criminal history checks used to support hiring decisions. That is not our market. Intelligo does not operate in the general employment background check space. We focus on comprehensive executive-level and institutional-grade risk intelligence for investors and financial institutions.
Our customers are asset allocators, limited partners, pension funds, endowments, investment banks, wealth managers, private equity firms, venture capital firms, lenders, and asset managers. These organizations are making high-stakes decisions regarding where to invest their resources and need a much deeper and broader view of risk than a simple check-the-box background screen.
We provide comprehensive risk intelligence. Our reports span legal records across multiple jurisdictions, regulatory filings, financial and reputational data, media, social media signals, and corporate relationships. We aim to deliver a 360-degree view of people and entities, and we do so with an unparalleled level of technology enablement coupled with human expertise.
We are fact-driven. Our goal is to provide our customers with verified, structured facts so they can understand their risk exposure (both financial and reputational), define their risk tolerance, and make confident decisions.
How did the company get started, to what market demand were you responding?
Intelligo was founded in 2014. The founders came from the intelligence community and recognized significant inefficiencies in the traditional due diligence and risk research industry. At the time, due diligence was slow, expensive, and inconsistent. Comprehensive reports often took four to six weeks and could cost tens of thousands of dollars. That created major problems. The cost and time limited how often investors could use due diligence, and the results frequently arrived too late in the investment process to meaningfully influence decisions.
At the same time, the digital age was exploding the volume of available data. Human analysts could not process the growing scale and complexity of information fast enough. Firms were constantly trading off speed versus depth.
The founders believed they could solve this problem by combining software, automation, and the benefits of human analytical judgment to deliver both speed and depth at scale.
What trends are you seeing in this market and how has your coupling of human research expertise with AI differentiated Intelligo?
One of the biggest trends in risk intelligence is the move away from one-and-done reports toward continuous monitoring and real-time intelligence. Historically, investors would perform due diligence once at the time of investment and then not revisit it for years.
Continuous monitoring changes that. Instead of a static snapshot, the system continually monitors legal activity, media coverage, regulatory developments, and other signals so investors can identify emerging risks as they happen. This is especially valuable for asset allocators and LPs who are not embedded in daily operations or on company boards and firms that work with a large number of entities such that it becomes infeasible to monitor their related counterparty risk without Intelligo’s support.
Another important trend is the increasing use and acceptance of AI. We make a clear distinction between deterministic AI and generative AI. Deterministic AI uses rules, machine learning, and structured logic to produce fact-based outputs. We have used this type of AI for many years in areas such as entity resolution, pattern recognition, and connecting disparate data points.
Human analysts validate and enrich the outputs, and their findings continuously train our supervised learning models. We also use modern AI tools for technical purposes such as extracting data from documents.
What we do not do is rely on probabilistic generative AI to produce conclusions or judgments. Large language models are inherently probabilistic, and in a risk context, accuracy and verifiable facts matter. Our outputs are always grounded in fact.
Tell me about your team and operational approach.
We operate as a global organization from both the perspectives of our headcount and our clients and their research subjects. Importantly, our research analysts operate across multiple locations globally, driving strong time-zone coverage. Having a geographically broad research footprint is integral for satisfying the global nature of larger institutions’ due diligence needs and a significant portion of our subjects are international as a result.
Operationally, everything runs through a fully integrated platform. Customer requests enter the system digitally, triggering automated workflows that assign work, prioritize deadlines, run automated searches, and coordinate human review. Analysts interact with the system in real time, and customers receive transparent updates throughout the process. If subject consent is required, the system automatically initiates and tracks that process. This eliminates manual steps that traditionally slow down due diligence operations.
Technology drives efficiency, scalability, accuracy, and speed. Training is also critical. Anyone contributing to customer outputs goes through rigorous training to ensure accuracy and consistency.
What are some of the specific challenges you have faced as the company has grown and how have you successfully addressed them?
One of the main challenges was having sufficient capital and strategic support to scale at the pace of our ambition. Our earlier investors had supported the company well, but the business had reached a point where it needed a partner capable of supporting accelerated growth.
That led to our partnership with Carrick Capital Partners. Carrick brought deep experience in scaling technology-enabled services businesses and strong domain expertise. They had previously invested in competitors in the space, which gave them valuable perspective on the market and the operational challenges, making the partnership a perfect fit.
Carrick recognized the strength of our technology platform and saw the opportunity to scale it more aggressively with the right resources and operational support.
What were your priorities for a PE partner?
Our top priority was finding a partner who truly understood technology-enabled services. Many investors view companies like ours as pure software or pure services businesses. Our revenue model is usage-based rather than subscription, and our technology drives efficiency rather than replacing service entirely.
We needed a partner who understood how to value and scale that model rather than forcing it into a SaaS framework that did not fit our reality.
Sector experience also mattered. Risk, compliance, privacy, and regulatory environments are complex, and having a partner with a strong network and domain knowledge is important. Carrick brought both strategic understanding and operational credibility.
What are the benefits of working with a group like Carrick Capital Partners?
Beyond capital, Carrick provides operational expertise. Their operating partners actively work with our leadership team on technology strategy and operational guidance. That level of hands-on support would be difficult and expensive to replicate independently.
They also have a deep bench of financial expertise that has been helpful. Most importantly, they are deeply engaged. They roll up their leaves and work with us. The same partners who led the investment remain actively involved in the business, which creates continuity and trust. They really know our business and function as an extension of our leadership team.
What is your advice for other growing businesses considering private equity?
Know exactly who you are partnering with. Some firms are passive capital providers. That may work for certain companies, but if you need operational support, strategic guidance, and hands-on engagement, you need to make sure you have found a partner that can meet those needs.
There is a lot of courting and salesmanship in private equity, so it is important to understand how a firm will operate after the deal closes. The level of responsiveness and support from Carrick is the same today as it was when we started talking about the deal. That kind of continuity is less common than it should be.
Tell me about your road map. What is next for Intelligo, and what are your long-term goals?
In the near term, our focus is scaling organically and through selective acquisitions and expanding our global footprint to meet customer demand.
Longer term, our ambition is to become the counterparty risk intelligence layer and decision support system for institutional investors and financial institutions. We want to be the platform that these firms rely on to understand risk holistically, uncover hidden insights in data, and gain competitive advantage.
That includes leveraging our unique data assets, combining public records with human intelligence, expanding continuous monitoring capabilities, and helping investors move beyond retrospective risk analysis toward proactive, real-time risk awareness. When we accomplish this, we will become the trusted system of record for financial institutions’ counterparty risk worldwide.
