Founder Story: Aidentified By Darr Aley

Welcome to a fresh perspective on data analytics and customer engagement with Aidentified.

Led by Founder and Chief Commercial Officer Darr Aley, along with Co-CEO and Founder Tom Aley, and Co-CEO Tom Rauker, this AI-powered platform revolutionizes how brands connect with clients and prospects by merging professional and household data for a complete 360º view.

Aidentified’s unique relationship-based prospecting, powered by AI and machine learning, draws from over 210 million consumer and 100 million professional U.S. profiles.

The platform provides essential insights into customer behaviors, real-time wealth events, and nuanced relationship mapping, enabling better decision-making across various industries.

Let's hear from the co-founder of Aidentified.

I'm Darr Aley, co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer at Aidentified. I’m an entrepreneur who has been lucky to work with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in areas that include mergers and acquisitions, business development, strategy, and operations.

I have started, invested, and/or joined companies in every stage of development (napkin to IPO) and seen them through to billions of dollars in exit value.

Included in these were executive roles for Shiva (sold to Intel), Avatar (sold to DCA), Ziff-Davis Publishing (Softbank), Zip2 (Compaq), WhoWhere (Lycos), and Epylon (Accenture). I’ve spent the last twenty years building companies in the B2B and B2C data analytics segments.

Prior to starting Aidentified with my brother Tom, we built and sold data analytics company, Generate (News Corp, 2008) and invested in Netprospex (D&B, 2015). Prior to Generate, I was at Amazon.com where I helped direct corporate development and M&A.

Aidentified is a pioneering AI-powered platform founded by Darr Aley and his brother, Tom Aley, designed to transform the way businesses connect with potential clients and donors.

The platform merges AI with extensive data analytics, offering a unique combination of professional and household data to provide a comprehensive 360º view of clients and prospects. This enables a highly personalized approach to prospecting and customer engagement.

Utilizing proprietary AI and machine learning technology, Aidentified accesses over 210 million consumer and 100 million professional profiles in the U.S., allowing brands to gain unparalleled insights into customer behaviors and relationships.

The platform is especially beneficial for sectors like wealth management, real estate, and higher education, where it streamlines the often cumbersome and costly processes of identifying and reaching out to potential leads.

Aidentified’s services are trusted by major organizations, including Four Seasons, Northwestern Mutual, and Merrill Lynch, reflecting its effectiveness in enhancing customer relationship management.

The platform not only helps identify the warmest paths for engagement but also provides real-time wealth events and detailed relationship mapping, which are critical for making informed business decisions.

With continuous improvements and expansions in data capabilities, Aidentified is set to keep advancing its technology to better serve its users, promising more refined and expansive relationship mapping and customer segmentation in the future.

This commitment to innovation and customer satisfaction underscores Aidentified’s role as a leader in the data enrichment and AI-driven prospecting space.

My brother Tom Aley and I founded the company as a way to streamline the costly and time-intensive process of identifying and reaching out to sales leads, prospective donors and potential customers for wealth managers, universities, real estate agents and others.

Of note, Aidentified has customers at Four Seasons, Northwestern Mutual and Merrill Lynch, as well as a number of SMBs in the financial space to name a few.

We actually practiced what we preach and made personal connections with people from various parts of our lives. We pitched friends, family, colleagues and their connections as well. Aidentified was created to help people and organizations create more meaningful relationships.

Right now, in sales and marketing, outbound communication follows a “spray and pray” methodology. Aidentified's solution powers more relevant, targeted outreach enabling a cultural shift in how relationships are created, and how they work.

Millions of profiles and billions of mapped connections discovered through AI and ML sourcing numerous public sites allow users to identify shared relationships to initiate a warm introduction.

That’s a long way of saying we’ve used our platform to find and invest in qualified leads to build our business.

You need believers on your side, and you need them to tell everyone they know. You can have the world’s greatest product, but you need users to vouch for you.

Once we started winning a few accounts, they saw immediate benefit to their business and started telling their friends and colleagues. It also helps that one of the largest industries we serve is wealth management.

In that industry, connections are everything. We consistently build our business through a network of happy customers who want to share that we are a bit of a “secret weapon.”

The current startup environment hasn’t changed much over the last few decades. It’s often all about who you know and tapping personal connections.

That kind of culture is severely limiting and exclusionary for entrepreneurs who may not yet have connections in “high up” places. That’s ultimately a disservice to all of us who could benefit from whatever idea that specific entrepreneur may have.

Fundraising is not for the faint of heart. The amount of candid (and sometimes harsh) feedback we received when we did our Series A was invaluable.

A lot of it was sometimes hard to hear, but we made improvements in the technology and the company as a whole thanks to the feedback investors gave us.

It was a gift. I always advise fellow entrepreneurs to see the fundraising process as that: a gift. You have to be ready for people to essentially “call your baby ugly,” but most of the time these folks know exactly what they are talking about and want to help.

Yes. We are constantly making tweaks and improvements to our platform to best serve our customers.Some examples include our AI mapped relationships.

Aidentified employs AI to visualize user connections with prospects and harness our clients' networks for referrals. In 2022, the company mapped 4 billion 1st-degree relationships and 100 million 2nd-degree relationships. Fast-forward to 2023, these numbers have surged to 16 billion 1st-degree connections and a staggering 400 billion 2nd-degree connections.

While platforms like LinkedIn provide visibility into shared connections, for example, there is no other technology that identifies key personal and professional connections in the same capacity and scale as Aidentified.

Additionally, we have a wealth segmentation model that encompasses 210 million individuals across the United States, spanning from less than $100k to over $1 billion in wealth.

In 2022, we utilized three key attributes: inferred income, property value, and remaining share balances. In 2023, Aidentified elevated its segmentation capabilities by integrating multiple properties, age, career data, trigger events (such as IPOs, Investments Received, and Acquisitions), and IRS zip+4 tax information.

This comprehensive approach sets Aidentified apart in the market, where many providers typically cap their segmentation at $2 Million.Last but not least, we integrate household and employment data to construct a comprehensive 360° profile of an individual.

This view incorporates both personal and professional details such as home address, age, interests, occupation, educational background, contact information, mapped relationships, household members, inferred income, wealth segmentation, and wealth triggers.

In 2022, we maintained 22 million of these profiles. By 2023, this number surged to nearly 50 million, signifying a substantial augmentation in the insights offered to users. We are confident in growing these numbers even more to power even more relationships.

To that end, the amount of data we have collected to date is staggering: 100B+ mapped relationships; 210M+ consumer profiles; 100M+ professional profiles; and $20T+ in tracked wealth events.

I’m most excited by the untapped potential in artificial intelligence. We really have only scratched the surface of what this particular technology is capable of. I think as long as we remain focused on how AI can best serve humans; to build, amplify and strengthen meaningful human relationships, AI will be an extraordinarily powerful and beneficial tool in the business space (and beyond!).

Solve a problem that you have in your personal or professional life. Build the solution. That’s exactly what Tom and I did with Aidentified. We worked to find a solution to the significant time and money prospecting takes.

We felt personally invested. We had skin in the game. That has made all the difference in getting Aidentified off the ground and serving a variety of really incredible customers.