Verified Person, the background-checking firm that got its start screening online daters, has picked up $12 million in its second round of funding as corporations and government agencies have bought into the technology.

CEO Tal Moise told RedHerring.comWednesday the money came from Sevin Rosen Funds and Rho Capital Partners. His startup has now raised a total of $14.5 million since it was founded two and a half years ago.

Mr. Moise seeded the New York-based company alongside John Scully, former CEO of Apple Computer and Pepsi, and now a venture partner with Rho Capital.

Mr. Moise founded Verified Person to help restore confidence in Internet transactions. He was acutely exposed to the problem while trying to find a date online. The first woman he tried to date was married.

“I found out through her husband,” he said.

He tried again and met somebody nice, but incompatible. The third woman he met online had a child she hadn’t told Mr. Moise about. “I thought at that point: I just don’t trust this community anymore,” Mr. Moise said.

The best way to find out about a potential date is to do some sleuthing, Mr. Moise said. “But ultimately, you’re violating their privacy.”

He wanted to develop a way for people to prove they were who they said they were by pointing to a third party. Just as VeriSign authenticates web sites, Mr. Moise thought he might be able to authenticate people.

His plan: leverage the reams of personally identifiable data available through a variety of sources into a single, secure database. Make that database easy to use and only give people access to a small slice of data.

Although he initially developed the product for verifying potential online dates, Mr. Moise found his first customer in the U.S. Department of Transportation. The department needed a way to ensure it wasn’t hiring criminals to handle baggage inside airports.

Corporate World Applications

The corporate world went for a modified version of Verified Person’s service that would plug in to its customer relationship management and human resources software. The system will perform a background check to ensure that the new customer, business partner, or employee does not have a criminal record or poor credit rating.

It can also be set up to send alerts if a status changes. It allows bosses to know immediately if their employees have been charged with drunk driving or spousal abuse, for example.

Police departments now use the service to track sex offenders who don’t register a new address after a move, Mr. Moise said.

The company also sells a service called VP ID, which will ensure that someone you meet on the Internet doesn’t have a history of violence. It checks the data volunteered on a dating site against its own records and gives an age, marital status, and safety synopsis.

“This is particularly important for women looking for dates online,” Mr. Moise said. “They need to know: does this person offer a physical risk?”

It will be some time before Verified Person’s products gain a similar level of ubiquity to VeriSign’s web site authentication service. Until then, Mr. Moise said that he has continued dating, but that he has restricted his efforts to the off-line world.