TrustBearer: the Fort Wayne security startup VeriSign bought

FOUNDED HERE · SOLD TO VERISIGN 2010 · PRICE UNDISCLOSED

The cleanest homegrown exit almost nobody in Fort Wayne heard about: David Corcoran graduated from Purdue in 2000, at the height of the internet boom, worked in California, Texas and Washington, and came home in 2004 to build a software company. His roots in the field ran back to 1996, writing smart-card software used across Macintosh, Linux and Solaris systems; his Fort Wayne firm, Identity Alliance, built identity and authentication products for clients that included Sun, Apple, Xerox and RSA Security. Its product, TrustBearer, let a small trusted device stand in for a password. Unveiled at the RSA Conference in February 2007, the company won Purdue's Opportunity for Indiana 50,000-dollar entrepreneurs' award that same month, raised its first 500,000 dollars entirely from Fort Wayne-area investors, and grew to eight employees at the Northeast Indiana Innovation Center — the era's local startup, documented in the state's own business press as it happened.

The outcome: on April 5, 2010, VeriSign — then one of the central infrastructure companies of the commercial internet — announced it had completed its acquisition of TrustBearer . The price was not disclosed, and this section prints none. The paper trail tells the rest of the story: the patent record shows TrustBearer's intellectual property assigned to VeriSign in April 2010 and onward to Symantec that November, when VeriSign's authentication business changed hands. Corcoran's second act belongs to the aftermath entry below: he co-founded the Ann Arbor internet-security company Censys in 2017 and was a founding investor in PearDeck, the education platform sold to GoGuardian in 2020 — while remaining, per his University of Michigan profile, a principal at a Fort Wayne-based venture firm. A modest exit by coastal measure; a complete one by the only measure this record uses: founded here, funded here, bought by a public internet company, in writing.

Sources:

1. SecureID News, April 5, 2010 — VeriSign finalizes its acquisition of TrustBearer secureidnews.com
2. Purdue University, February 19, 2007 — Identity Alliance of Fort Wayne wins the Opportunity for Indiana 50,000-dollar award; Corcoran's smart-card work back to 1996; the TrustBearer unveiling at RSA. purdue.edu
3. Indiana Business Magazine, 2007 — TrustBearer at the Northeast Indiana Innovation Center; the 500,000-dollar first round raised entirely in the Fort Wayne area; eight employees. thefreelibrary.com
4. U.S. patent assignment record, US20070300057A1 — Identity Alliance to TrustBearer (2009), TrustBearer to VeriSign (April 2010), VeriSign to Symantec (November 2010). patents.google.com
5. University of Michigan, Innovation Partnerships, and Michigan Founders Fund — Corcoran as Censys co-founder, Fort Wayne-based Digital Cowboy/Big Throttle Ventures principal, and PearDeck founding investor. innovationpartnerships.umich.edu; michiganfoundersfund.org