New structure supports the company’s mission, values, and its belief that identity technology should serve the public interest.
Decentralized identity is a transformational technology that can protect an individual’s privacy, enable their consent in data sharing, and provide a pathway to formal identity for hundreds of millions of people currently without any legal means of proving who they are. Indicio.tech was founded to advance decentralized identity through providing the kind of professional services and critical infrastructure that can catalyze adoption of this technology. Today, in recognition of the role it can play in building and shaping a technology for the greater good, Indicio, announces that it has reincorporated as a public benefit corporation (PBC).
Indicio joins companies such as Patagonia and Kickstarter in embracing a corporate model that aligns shareholders and stakeholders around a shared mission to deliver a material benefit to society, not only through products and services and how they are made and delivered, but through prioritizing the welfare of employees, diversity and inclusion, and environmental impact.
“When it comes to our digital lives, it is hard to think of a technological advance more beneficial to the public than decentralized identity,” says Heather Dahl, CEO of Indicio. “It will transform people’s digital lives by giving them control over who they are online and who they share information with. It will create identity for the hundreds of millions of people who currently lack formal, legal identity, which means giving them a way to access financial and health services. The advances in identity technology help us recover some of the lost, early idealism of the internet as a benefit to everyone. And while we know one company can’t save the world, we can take a stand about how the world can be a better place. Decentralized identity is our stand.”
As a Delaware PBC, the company will operate under the same management structure and corporate and tax laws it does today and with the same commitment to strong growth and profitability.
“Decentralized identity needs a variety of business models to rapidly scale,” says Dahl. “And we think for Indicio, the PBC model combines the best attributes of the traditional for-profit corporation with the public mission orientation of a nonprofit. We need to be agile. We need to be sustainable. We need to be innovative. And we need all of these qualities to be directed, without compromise, toward advancing decentralized identity.”
“For Indicio, becoming a PBC means honoring the idealism of the open source community that brought decentralized identity technology into existence,” says Ken Ebert CTO. “This means open sourcing the infrastructure that we build, and by making interoperability the compass point that directs how we build for others. Indicio has already begun doing this by open-sourcing its monitoring tools package and the company is about to release more tools and services that will make it easier for companies to develop and use decentralized identity solutions.”
As a PBC, Indicio will continue to pioneer architectural solutions and deliver superlative development and engineering support to its list of global customers, and it will do so by cultivating a company culture where employees and interns can get the professional development and mentoring they need in order to consistently deliver their best.
“When we reflect on the values that inspired our launch, propelled our growth, and delivered for our customers, we want to bake them into our company,” says Dahl. “We want to hold ourselves accountable to those values, and we want to be held publicly accountable for them. That’s a powerful feature of the PBC model. And just as it has enabled credible, third-party assessment on whether a company is delivering on its environmental commitments, we see it as providing a path for identity technology to be assessed in a similar way. There’s a long way to go, but at a time, when technology is under increasing criticism, we have a chance to build better and audit better from the beginning.”
Indicio joins a growing number of companies worldwide embracing the public benefit corporate model recognizing that businesses can build greater long-term value by committing to stakeholders, employees, and communities. So far, 35 states and the District of Columbia have passed legislation enabling public benefit corporations (sometimes called benefit corporations), and many countries have followed with similar legislation.
Indicio’s PBC status will position the company as a leader in trusted identity platform builders as they advance the technology, the industries it serves, and connect the growing field of decentralized identity vendors. Indicio will set out its public benefit goals in the coming weeks.
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About Indicio
Indicio.tech is a professional services firm specializing in decentralized identity architecture, engineering, and consultancy. Indicio provides expert guidance to a global community of customers on the use of verifiable credentials to build digital identity solutions. The decentralized networks and tools created by Indicio make verifiable credentials easy to adopt, simple to deploy, and reliable to use. As a Public Benefit Corporation, Indicio is committed to advancing decentralized identity as a public good that enables people to control their identities online and share their data by consent. Indicio believes in privacy and security by design, interoperability, and supports the open source goals of the decentralized identity community.