Registered name and trading name
Both, where they differ, because they usually do and only one of them is searchable.
Coverage
What goes in, and what doesn't.
The markets being researched, what a record holds, and the standard a company has to clear before it is recorded. Counts are published market by market, as each one is finished.
Why there are no numbers on this page yet. Research is under way and nothing has been sold. A company count published today would be a count of work in progress, and buyers would reasonably read it as a count of finished, checked records. When a market is finished, its exact count is published here, generated from the records themselves rather than typed in by hand.
The standard
What checked has to mean.
Bulk registry data is cheap because it is mostly noise. Everything that makes a company list worth paying for happens in these four steps.
- 01
The company is real and trading
A registry entry alone proves an entity was incorporated, not that a business exists. A record needs a second signal — an active website, a filed set of non-dormant accounts, or a verifiable trading presence — before it goes in.
- 02
The registry entry matches the business
The hardest step and the one bulk data skips. Group structures, renamed entities and shared registered addresses mean the entity that files is often not the business you would contact. Both are recorded, and which is which is recorded too.
- 03
Activity comes from the company, not the code
Standard industry codes are chosen at incorporation and rarely updated. The company’s own description of what it does is recorded alongside the filed code, so you can see where the two disagree.
- 04
There is a route in
A working website, and where published, the general company email, the switchboard number and the officers the company itself puts on the public record.
By market
Where the companies are being researched.
| Market | Primary source | Status |
|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom | Companies House | In research |
| Singapore | ACRA | In research |
| Hong Kong | Companies Registry | In research |
| Ireland | Companies Registration Office | In research |
| Australia | ASIC | In research |
| United States | State-level registries | In research |
United Kingdom
The most open major registry in the world: filings, officers and persons with significant control are all public and free. Also the noisiest, because incorporation is trivially cheap and dormant entities vastly outnumber trading ones.
Singapore
Comprehensive and reliable, with most detail behind a per-document fee. Business profiles are consistent enough that matching a registry entry to a real trading business is unusually clean.
Hong Kong
Full company particulars are public on a per-search basis. Group structures are common and a single operating business often sits under several registered entities.
Ireland
Well-structured filings and a small enough population that sector coverage can be genuinely complete rather than merely broad.
Australia
Company existence and officers are on the register; financial statements largely are not, because most proprietary companies are exempt from filing them.
United States
No federal company register, so the ground truth is fifty separate state systems of wildly differing quality. Slower to research than any other market on this list, and the reason it is not first.
Filing requirements differ by jurisdiction, so record depth differs with them. That is a property of the source, not something to be smoothed over — where a market discloses less, the records will hold less, and the fields will be blank rather than filled with an estimate.
The fields
What a record actually holds.
Registry identifier
The company number in its home jurisdiction, so any row can be checked against the source in seconds.
Legal form and status
Private limited, partnership, unlimited, and whether the entity is active, dormant or in an insolvency process.
Activity
The company's own description, plus the industry code it files under, kept as separate fields.
Registered and trading address
Two fields. A registered office is frequently an accountant, and mailing it is a wasted approach.
Officers
Directors and officers as they appear on the public record, in their professional capacity only.
Revenue, headcount and beneficial ownership are recorded only where the company files or publishes them. In most jurisdictions small companies are exempt from filing accounts in full, so for most private companies these fields will be blank — which means not published, never zero and never none.
Coverage enquiry
Ask about your market.
If you need a particular country or sector, say so. It tells us what to research next, and we will tell you honestly where that market stands today.