University of Kwazulu-Natal

Opencorporates The Open Database Of The Corporate World

Bonisiwe Shabane
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opencorporates the open database of the corporate world

Understanding how companies connect has become a critical part of modern business intelligence. For assessing risk, managing compliance, or researching markets, you need to know more than just a company’s name and registration number - you need to know who owns what and how those entities relate. OpenCorporates, the world’s largest open database of legal entity data, will make its debut at Money20/20 USA (Oct 26–29, 2025, Las Vegas). The company will showcase how standardised, transparent, official legal entity data empowers fintechs, RegTechs, and financial institutions to meet regulatory demands, enhance KYC/KYB, and combat financial crime. Visit OpenCorporates at Booth #19703 for live demos and exclusive insights. The Santo Tequila case is a classic example of double brokering - when one freight company passes a shipment to another, and then another.

At some point in the chain, a non-existent “carrier” steps in. These so-called phantom carriers look credible: they have names like Acme Logistics LLC, registered phone numbers, even government-issued identification numbers. But behind them, there’s often no legal entity, no employees, and sometimes not even a real address. They win contracts, move goods - and then disappear. Companies, banks, and regulators can no longer rely on a single dataset or a single rulebook. They need to bring multiple pieces of information together to understand risk and make informed decisions.

This is where legal-entity knowledge graphs (LE-KGs) come in. They act as the “map” of companies and their connections, showing ownership, control, and risk. Collecting, cleaning, and maintaining company data directly from 50 separate US state registries (plus DC and territories) is possible - but only with significant, ongoing expense in money, time, and specialist effort. Variation across states in data availability, formats, fee models, and cadence - paired with legal/licensing friction - turns “do‑it‑yourself” into a long, laborious program rather than a one‑off project. OpenCorporates is a database which aims to gather information on all the companies in the world. The database currently offers information on 50 million companies in 65 different jurisdictions.

You want to know more about Nike, Facebook and McDonald's? OpenCorporates aims to do a straightforward (though big) thing: have a URL for every company in the world. OpenCorporates is probably the largest open database of companies in the world. You can search more than 84 million companies and directors from all jurisdictions. If you are an investigative journalist, researcher, an activist or simply a curious citizen you can dive into the incredible amounts of data released by OpenCorporates and download it under Open Database license. You can query OpenCorporates from the homepage, use the API, or download the data to include it into your research or website.

Information that can be found on OpenCorporates includes a company's incorporation date, its registered addresses and its registry page, as well as a list of directors and officers. Las Vegas, NV – [OCT 8th, 2025] –OpenCorporates, the world’s largest open database of companies, today announced that it will attend Money20/20 USA (October 26–29, 2025, Las Vegas) for the first time. The company will use the event to spotlight how transparent legal entity data enables the Money20/20 audience to solve mission-critical challenges. For RegTech and compliance providers, OpenCorporates delivers the trusted global legal entity data that underpins KYC, KYB, onboarding, and AML screening. For fintechs and payment processors, it powers faster, more reliable onboarding to meet tightening global regulatory demands. And for corporate verification and digital identity platforms, it provides the global coverage and structured data needed to differentiate and seamlessly integrate into workflows.

With coverage across 140+ jurisdictions, OpenCorporates will demonstrate how open, transparent data underpins compliance, accelerates growth, and fuels innovation across the global financial ecosystem. Money20/20 is the leading global event for the fintech and payments industry, drawing thousands of leaders from banks, startups, regulators, and technology providers. As the sector faces mounting pressure from regulators and customers to improve transparency and combat financial crime, OpenCorporates’ presence marks an important step in helping institutions leverage trusted company data to meet these challenges. Attendees can find OpenCorporates at Booth #19703. “We’re excited to be at Money20/20 with the fintech and financial services community,” said Jen Miller, Chief Revenue Officer at OpenCorporates. “In an age of AI, risk, and increasing fraud, provenance matters more than ever.

OpenCorporates provides company data from official sources, with links and dates, giving firms the confidence to build and innovate on a foundation of truth.” The largest open database of company data in the world, with data from over 140 registries. OpenCorporates is a global database of companies, their directors and regulatory filings. We provide links to OpenCorporates for entities that exist both in our database and in the OpenCorporates database. These links can be used to explore more detail about sanctioned companies. OpenCorporates customers with bulk data or API access can also use the OpenCorporates URL to integrate both datasets, for example to build an in-house knowledge graph with sanctions and company control information.

Note: as of May 2022, we have only linked some sanctioned companies to OpenCorporates. In the future, we also hope to create links regarding directors and beneficial owners of companies, for example in cases where the owner is a politicially exposed person (PEP). This dataset contains entities from a larger database that is used to enrich the data in OpenSanctions with additional details and connections. We only include entities from the source where there is a relevant connection to the entities in the main OpenSanctions database (e.g. to a sanctions target or a politician). OpenCorporates was founded over 12 years ago, and since then has become the default source for trusted legal entity data.

It has also directly and indirectly inspired countless companies and projects in the open company data space. This document highlights some of these, and our relationship with them. Legal entities are the fundamental structures that underpin the entire business world. In the highly connected digital age we live in, they also underpin the whole of society as we know it. This is why it’s vital that the data defining them – their existence, ownership, activities and beneficiaries – is not just public, but connected in a single unified dataset, available for all. For over 12 years we have led the cause for open data.

We’ve built a data platform to provide a single unified view of the company universe. Data that’s trusted, rich and open to all. But we are not alone. Our partners are some of the world’s most influential advocates for corporate transparency and open data. Below is an incomplete list of the ones we work closest with. The Global LEI Foundation was founded 10 years ago, at the behest of the G20, following the financial crisis, when regulators and the financial industry struggled to identify the counterparties of the financial contracts...

Even though OpenCorporates was a new and relatively small organisation then, it was invited to be a part of the Industry Advisory Panel that advised on the LEI System’s structure, as it had a... OpenCorporates’ Co-Founder and CEO was also a founding member of the board of directors of the Global LEI Foundation, and served on the board for 5 years.

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