Jan 29, 2025
We are thrilled to welcome Matt DeSarno, Co-Founder and CEO of Verfico, and Douglas Carney, Co-Founder and CEO of Odin, to our latest founder spotlight interview. MetaProp first invested in Verfico in 2024 as part of our early-stage Accelerator program, and today, we're excited to discuss the recent acquisition by Odin.
Introduction
Evan Petitt (MetaProp): Matt and Doug, big congratulations on the acquisition. Can you each tell us a bit about yourselves?
Matt DeSarno (Verfico): I'm Matt DeSarno, I'm the CEO of Verfico Technology. I will be the President and Chief Operating Officer of Odin post-acquisition, and I'm a proud graduate of the MetaProp Accelerator, which really helped serve as a catalyst, I think, to this acquisition, and certainly a catalyst for our growth at Verfico. We started Verfico in November of 2022, and here we are, just a little over two years later, being acquired by Odin and merging our companies. So, I'm very excited about it.
Doug Carney (Odin): I’m Douglas Carney, CEO of Odin. My background has been focused on building startups since coming out of school. My first startup was acquired by Mark Cuban in 2015. I spent time in venture building Soma Capital, and what I found was there wasn't much investment being made in the construction space. That's where I moved into building Odin in 2020. And now I'm here, obviously working with Matt, who I've grown to really enjoy working with, and being able to take this company to the next level.
Verfico and Odin's Journey
Evan Petitt (MetaProp): Matt, can you share the journey of founding Verfico and how your vision adapted leading up to the acquisition?
Matt DeSarno (Verfico): After my FBI career, I was looking at more entrepreneurial opportunities. My brother owns a large drywall subcontractor that had faced a wage theft lawsuit. They couldn't find a solution in the marketplace to prevent this, so they created the prototype of Verfico. We saw an opportunity to protect companies from exposure by unscrupulous subcontractors who were mismanaging payroll compliance.
We started working with Odin very early on because they were already doing access control and worker credential management. We saw that the value of the two companies together was far greater than one plus one equals two. As our vision has adapted, Doug and I started talking more about where the most growth in the sector lives, and we are focused on the areas where construction is exploding: data centers, critical infrastructure, and affordable housing. All 3 of those areas really fit well for our tools to combine, because there are compliance requirements and wage reporting compliance requirements on many of those jobs.
Evan Petitt (MetaProp): Doug, Odin's carved out an impressive position in the workforce risk management space since the company was founded in 2020. Can you talk a little bit about how the company has grown into this position?
Doug Carney (Odin): So I first started looking at this category from an investor angle. I saw there wasn't much technology investment in construction. It was a neglected portion of most portfolios. Coming from my father's construction business background, I saw the need for technology, but adoption was low. The mindset back then was "it's working, why change it?"
COVID changed everything in 2020. Suddenly, everyone needed to track workers on job sites for health reasons, which created a fundamental shift in how people thought about construction technology. In the early days, we built a COVID contact tracing solution for job sites, which helped companies see the value of using technology to track site activity.
What's unique about our growth is we didn't have an external sales function - all our sales came from customers bringing us to new projects. We took a different approach from others in the space: instead of just shipping a product, we listened carefully to our customers and iterated quickly based on their feedback. Construction is a very trust-driven business, and face-to-face relationships matter more than Zoom calls.
We started in New York City's residential market, but one of our biggest milestones was expanding beyond that. We've seen success in California, Chicago, Florida, Texas, and particularly Northern Virginia with its data centers. The market is different in every region, but we're seeing increasing acceptance of technology across job sites.
Looking forward, we believe data centers will be one of the biggest opportunities - there's essentially 0% occupancy in Northern Virginia, and about 3,000 new centers are needed in the next five years. The federal government just announced a $500 billion commitment to advance our AI capabilities, but the US has fallen behind in infrastructure. That's where our combined platform becomes crucial. Odin's workforce tracking and Verfico's wage compliance create a comprehensive solution to help manage these government funds responsibly as we build this critical infrastructure. This transparency is essential as these massive federal investments roll out.
Evan Petitt (MetaProp): Looking back on your relationship with the MetaProp team, what impact did the Accelerator have in your growth?
Matt DeSarno (Verfico): The MetaProp Accelerator was one of the crucible moments in our company's lifecycle. The access to other companies in the cohort was incredibly valuable - we all learned so much from each other. MetaProp's reputation and network opened a bunch of doors for us. Still today, they're our only outside investor, and I don't think we would be at our current revenue, north of $1M if we hadn't entered the accelerator last year.
The Acquisition
Evan Petitt (MetaProp): Doug, what made Verfico and Matt an attractive acquisition candidate?
Doug Carney (Odin): A few things really stood out. First, we knew payroll was a complicated space to operate in, and Verfico had built a really efficient solution. Second, this is a very high-trust industry, and from the earliest days of working with Matt, I trusted him deeply. His FBI background, combined with his team's experience in military and law enforcement, brings crucial expertise to our job site compliance and access control management.
This is particularly valuable in the data center space, where we're dealing with government cloud infrastructure and highly sensitive information. Being US-based gives us an advantage over competitors from Israel or Canada who can't operate on certain government job sites due to security requirements.
Looking Forward
Evan Petitt (MetaProp): As you're starting to come up for air after the acquisition, what excites you both most about the future?
Matt DeSarno (Verfico): It's just the massive opportunity ahead. Doug has extensive technical and product experience, and his team is really strong. The opportunity for growth in data centers, infrastructure, and affordable housing is almost unlimited.
Doug Carney (Odin): What excites me is that in every customer conversation, there's some part of our suite of tools that they want. There are too many point solutions out there forcing teams to jump between 5-7 different products. As a combined entity, we can serve customers who were traditionally outside either of our individual wheelhouses.
Evan Petitt (MetaProp): Give us a window into 2025. What are some of your strategy and customer acquisition goals?
Matt DeSarno (Verfico): Our goal is to gain enough traction in Q1 to position ourselves for a Series A, with the end-of-year goal of exceeding $5 million in annualized software revenue. Nobody else is doing the wage piece like we are, and Odin's highly customizable platform sets us apart. When we scale to 300,000-500,000 workers in our database, we can have a significant impact on the construction labor shortage. We'll understand the workforce better than anyone else and be able to advise customers and policymakers on labor needs.
Doug Carney (Odin): We're focusing strongly on data centers - there's a need for about 3,000 new ones in the next five years. The government has made major commitments through the Infrastructure Bill, the CHIPS Act, and the new $500 billion pledge for data centers. Our business is perfectly aligned to monitor this work and ensure government money isn't wasted.
Also, the US has dropped from number one globally in infrastructure to about thirteenth. There's been a capital correction from the government, but a lot of that money hasn't been deployed yet. We're at the starting point of a massive deployment over the next five years.
Evan Petitt (MetaProp): Amazing opportunity for you both. We're excited to follow your progress in 2025 and beyond.
Further reading: "Odin to Acquire Fellow Proptech Startup Verfico Technology" via Commercial Observer.
