Who We Are
An Overview of Appriss
Appriss was founded in 1994 as the VINE company by Mike Davis, our Co-founder and Board Chairman, and Yung Nguyen with a very simple belief: technology can do a lot of good in society. Since our humble beginnings building a system to help our local community in Jefferson County, Kentucky, we have grown leaps and bounds and our solutions serve thousands of agencies and corporations and millions of people every day. Our journey has taken us far beyond Kentucky, the home of our corporate headquarters, to now having offices in two continents and customers in 25 countries on 4 continents.
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VINE keeps over 25 million people safe and informed
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VINE provides over 40 million notifications each year
The Founding of Appriss
The two founders – Mike and Yung – were moved to respond to a very unfortunate incident in 1993 wherein a young woman, Mary Byron, was murdered by her former boyfriend. The murder took place shortly after the offender was released from jail for a crime he had committed against Mary.
The idea that her life could have perhaps been saved if the family could have been notified when the offender was being released from jail inspired the creation of VINE, the nation’s most widely used automated victim notification platform.
Growing Beyond VINE
As VINE grew, so did our arrest data network. We currently monitor nearly 2,500 data sources and capture information on 80% of the incarcerations in the country in less than an hour! This arrest data network is leveraged to solve myriad problems related to safety, security, fraud and risk.
In collaboration with law enforcement officials, we developed and launched our Justice Intelligence platform in 2001 to assist field officers and analysts access the near real-time arrest data network to more effectively fight crime.
Around this time it became clear that our mission was evolving to expand on who we were, and so we renamed The VINE Company, to Appriss, which was derived from the word apprise, or to inform.
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Appriss’ Justice Intelligence platform supports over 50 million searches for offenders as law enforcement agencies and corporations tackle issues of safety.
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To date, NPLEx has blocked the illegal sale of over 31 million grams of pseudoephedrine.
Continuing to Evolve Our Business
The next big step in our journey was to help state governments combat the rise in the diversion of over-the-counter cold medicine into the production of methamphetamine. Pharmacy chains also needed an effective solution to comply with CMEA, a federal regulation aimed at curbing drug diversion. We launched MethCheck and NPLEx in 2007 and 2009 respectively.
Today, NPLEx analyzes over 112 million cold medicine purchase requests each year and ensures that pharmacies efficiently comply with the law. In 2016, NPLEx blocked the illegal sale of over 4 million boxes of pseudoephedrine that otherwise may have been used in the illicit manufacture of methamphetamine.
Developing New Safety Solutions
As we continued to look for opportunities to leverage the arrest data network to solve societal issues, we targeted two new areas: reducing improper payments within our government entitlement programs (think Unemployment Insurance, Medicaid and others), and mitigating insider threat risk for employers and businesses. With these societal issues in mind, we launched the Incarceration Intelligence and Risk Intelligence platforms in 2011.
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Fourteen state workforce agencies employ the Appriss Incarceration Intelligence platform to save tens of millions of dollars.
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Today, physicians and pharmacists process more than 6 million transactions per month in their daily workflow to help take better care of their patients.
Growing Our Health Solutions
As NPLEx continued to grow, more pharmacies began to rely on it to comply with federal regulations and mitigate possible diversion of pseudoephedrine for unlawful purposes. While the manufacture of methamphetamine began to decrease, another major substance abuse issue affecting our society came to the forefront – the prescription opioid epidemic. According to the latest CDC report, over 40,000 people die in the US due to opioid overdose.
In 2013, and in conjunction with the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP), we launched PMP AWARxE, our prescription drug monitoring solution. In the years since, we have been devoted to creating the most comprehensive platform to address substance use disorder, helping physicians, pharmacists and state administrators identify, prevent and manage SUD.
An Interesting Title
As you can probably tell by now, our evolution as a company has always followed a few themes: is there a large problem that affects our society; can technology and analytical minds solve the problem; and does solving the problem create social good? That led us to another major problem set: retail fraud.
In 2015, we found an exciting team of brilliant technologists and data scientists that had built some predictive analytics solutions to help retailers identify and prevent fraud. We got our first major foothold into retail analytics through our acquisition of The Retail Equation (TRE). TRE provides leading predictive analytics solutions to retailers to prevent return fraud and to engender even greater loyalty from the best customers.
We made a follow-on acquisition of another great team of technologists and retail experts – SysRepublic – in 2015. The Sys team brings deep expertise in retail operations and an international perspective to the problems facing retailers. With the combined capabilities of SysRepublic’s Secure platform and TRE’s Verify and Retail Rewards, Appriss’ Retail division provides a comprehensive predictive analytics platform for retailers across a global footprint.
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Our customers reduce shrink by 12.9% after they deploy our fraud mitigation solutions.