Naveen Jain at the Intelius offices in Bellevue
Naveen Jain at the Intelius offices in Bellevue

Background check provider Intelius and its Bellevue-based parent company, Inome Inc., have been sold to private equity firm H.I.G. in a deal that tops $100 million, GeekWire has learned.

The acquisition comes 12 years after former InfoSpace CEO Naveen Jain co-founded Intelius, creating a new way for people to peruse criminal records and conduct background checks online.

Jain declined to disclose the purchase price of the public records company, but we’ve heard it is in the $100 million to $200 million range.

Jain will retain about a 25 percent interest in the company, while many of the other existing shareholders sold their shares in the transaction, which closed Wednesday. Jain tells GeekWire that Intelius is doing well, and that existing shareholders wanted some liquidity after 12 years. He called the a deal “a good outcome for all parties,” noting that Intelius and Inome were generating $15 million in EBITDA for the trailing 12 months.

“We had a lot of interest,” said Jain, adding that Intelius and Inome did not have any venture capitalists pressuring for a sale. “A lot of the founders who worked for very little salary wanted some liquidity…. and wanted to be an entrepreneur again.”

He declined to discuss revenues, but in 2010 Intelius was already producing about $150 million in revenue. Those figures include TalentWise, a Bothell-based business that spun off from Intelius two years ago. In 2010, Intelius canceled plans for an IPO.

About 60 people will remain at Intelius and Inome, with another 20 people — mostly those associated with Inome’s business-to-business unit — departing. Among those leaving is Jain, who tells GeekWire that he’s going to pursue a new venture in the health IT arena.

“I am starting a next set of adventures in the health tech area, because I really believe that the next industry that needs to be disrupted is health tech, with diagnostics and sensors and analytics and machine learning to be able to non-intrusively detect cancer, to detect diabetes and detect all kinds of diseases,” he said.

In addition, Jain said that he will spend more time on Moon Express, his commercial space venture.

intelius_logoH.I.G is a large private equity firm with more than $17 billion under management. Its portfolio includes companies such as Lexmark, Onyx Payments and TestAmerica.

Under the new ownership, Intelius will be led by president and CEO Prakash Kondepudi, a longtime executive who previously worked with Jain at InfoSpace. Jain said that nothing will change with the Intelius business moving forward, and the company will remain in Bellevue.

Intelius was co-founded by Kevin Marcus, Niraj Shah, Ed Petersen, Chandan Chauhan, John Arnold and Naveen Jain, all of whom worked at InfoSpace. Marcus left the company in late 2010 to start Seattle area analytics startup Versium, while Chauhan left last year to start an Internet of Things startup called ClockTree Systems. Many of the other founders have also moved on to new pursuits.

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