Mark Briggs

Founder, Chairman and CEO Validity Inc.

Last Reviewed: September 28, 2026

Executive Summary

Mark Briggs is Founder, Chairman and CEO of Validity, a Boston software company that helps marketers and sales teams keep their email deliverable and their CRM data clean. Validity is largely a product of acquisition: Briggs took the helm in 2018 in partnership with Silversmith Capital Partners, and has since assembled data-quality, email-verification, deliverability and email-design businesses under one name, most recently Litmus in 2025. He came to it straight from running ABILITY Network, a healthcare connectivity company that Inovalon bought for $1.2 billion in 2018, and he trained as a physicist at Dartmouth.

Career Highlights

• Named Chairman and CEO of Validity in May 2018, when Silversmith Capital Partners led a growth equity investment and Validity acquired CRMfusion, maker of DemandTools.
• Led a series of acquisitions including BriteVerify (2018), Return Path (2019), AppBuddy (2019), MailCharts (2022) and Litmus (2025).
• Former CEO of ABILITY Network, whose $1.2 billion sale to Inovalon closed on 2 April 2018.
• Founded LinkSoft Technologies and led it as Chairman and CEO before selling it; later President of MPI Solutions at QuadraMed Corporation.
• EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2024 New England Award finalist.
• Chairman of the Board of Advisors of Dartmouth’s Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies, and a Senior Advisor to Silversmith Capital Partners.

Professional Journey

Briggs studied physics at Dartmouth College, taking a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in theoretical physics, before building a career in software. He founded LinkSoft Technologies and ran it as Chairman and CEO until it was sold, then served as President of MPI Solutions at QuadraMed Corporation, and held executive roles at the healthcare technology companies Carefx and NaviNet.

He then became CEO of ABILITY Network, a Minneapolis-based cloud provider of connectivity and analytics for healthcare providers and payers, serving more than 44,000 provider sites. In March 2018 Inovalon agreed to acquire ABILITY for $1.2 billion in cash and restricted stock, and the deal completed on 2 April 2018.

Within weeks, on 1 May 2018, Silversmith Capital Partners announced a growth equity investment in Validity, the acquisition of CRMfusion, a data-quality software provider for Salesforce customers, and Briggs’s appointment as Chairman and CEO. The company describes him as having founded Validity in partnership with Silversmith. What followed was a buy-and-build strategy: BriteVerify for email verification in 2018; Return Path, the email deliverability company, in 2019, when Providence Strategic Growth also invested alongside Silversmith; AppBuddy in 2019; MailCharts in 2022; and Litmus, the email design and testing platform, announced in April 2025. Briggs said then that Litmus would give customers “this industry-leading, comprehensive, and unified platform.”

Validity now presents itself as an AI-enabled marketing success platform, processing more than 2.5 billion data points a day, with products including DemandTools, BriteVerify, Everest, GridBuddy Connect and the Validity Engage email platform launched in February 2026. The leadership around Briggs has changed as the company has grown: Mike Piispanen became President and Chief Operating Officer in March 2025, and in January 2026 Validity appointed former Rapid7 CFO Tim Adams as Chief Financial Officer. Briggs chairs Validity’s board, whose other directors come from Silversmith and Providence Strategic Growth.

Outside Validity, he is a Senior Advisor to Silversmith Capital Partners and chairs the Board of Advisors of Dartmouth’s Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies.

Education

Dartmouth College

MS, Theoretical Physics

Dartmouth College

BS, Physics