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i3 Verticals sells software and payment processing to small and mid-sized organizations, mostly in the public sector and healthcare.
i3 Verticals is a software and payments company that mostly serves unglamorous but essential customers: local governments, school districts, courts, public utilities, and healthcare providers. The basic idea is that these organizations have old, messy ways of taking money and managing records, and i3 Verticals sells them modern software plus the ability to accept and process payments. So a county clerk's office might use its tools to run court records and take filing fees, or a doctor's office might use it to handle scheduling and patient payments.
The company runs in two broad pieces. One is the software side, where it sells purpose-built systems for specific niches like courts, justice systems, and public administration, where generic tools don't fit well. The other is payments, where it takes a small cut of each transaction that flows through those systems. The clever part is that the software makes the payment stream sticky: once a government or clinic runs its operations on i3's system, ripping it out is painful, so the payment fees keep rolling in. Its main customers are public-sector bodies and healthcare organizations, and it grows largely by buying small software companies that already dominate a narrow niche, then adding payments on top. That buy-and-build approach has made it acquisitive and fairly debt-heavy at times, and it has worked to shift its mix toward more software revenue, which is steadier than payment processing. In fiscal 2024 the company reported revenue of roughly a few hundred million dollars, with growth driven heavily by acquisitions.
The honest picture is a company that is useful but not flashy. Its competitors include big payment processors and other vertical software firms that also want to own the checkout at the doctor's office or the courthouse. Its strengths are sticky customers and specialized software that's hard to replace; its risks are reliance on government budgets, integration headaches from constant dealmaking, and the debt taken on to fund it.
Saved answer 路 last researched 6 Nov 2026