Building and Scaling a New Industry

When I first encountered IBT, it wasn’t an established company. It was a small group of founders with an idea about a market that didn’t fully exist yet.

They believed that organizations would move from ink-based fingerprinting to electronic capture and submission. At the time, that meant selling devices—fingerprint scanners—and basic software to use them. The technology was new, and the market was uncertain.

They came to us at Lockheed Martin to build the initial system.

We developed the core workstation and backend components that allowed fingerprints to be captured, packaged, and transmitted. IBT funded that development and took it to market. Early on, the model was straightforward: sell systems to customers who would operate them themselves.

That worked for initial adoption, but it wasn’t the model that would scale.

The shift came with a state-level opportunity.

A large public system needed to perform background checks across a distributed population. They didn’t want to purchase and operate a network of equipment. They wanted the outcome—fingerprints captured, processed, and delivered.

The model changed.

Instead of selling hardware, IBT began providing fingerprinting as a service. The company would supply and maintain the equipment, train operators, and manage the flow of transactions. Customers would pay per transaction.

That changed the economics completely.

It aligned cost with usage. It simplified the decision for customers. And it created a model that could scale across states and agencies.

That became the foundation.

From there, the company expanded into additional state and federal programs. The market itself began to take shape, with competitors entering and evolving similar approaches. What had been a device sale became an operational system.

At one point, we were brought into a federal opportunity to support a large-scale background check program. The requirement was urgent, and the process was compressed. The team was small, and the case we made was grounded in something real: we could show how the model worked, how it was priced, and how it could scale.

That program became a major federal contract and validated the approach at national scale.

Over time, the industry consolidated. IBT was acquired into a larger platform designed to bring together multiple parts of the identity market. I joined as Vice President of Engineering, and the focus shifted to scaling and integrating what had been built.

A key moment came when the primary competitor was also acquired. There was a decision to be made about which model would define the combined business. The service model—transaction-based, distributed, operational—became the foundation, and the competing systems were integrated into it.

From that point forward, the company expanded its position across state and federal programs.

The market did not exist in its final form at the beginning.

It was shaped—through the model, the execution, and the ability to operate it at scale.