OpenCorporates is the largest open database of companies and company data in the world, with in excess of 100 million companies in a similarly large number of jurisdictions. Our primary goal is to make information on companies more usable and more widely available for the public benefit, particularly to tackle the use of companies for criminal or anti-social purposes, for example corruption, money laundering and organised crime.
This public mission is made possible with a sustainable business model that ensures that the public benefit is put first, and that we aren’t dependent on short-term grants, or donations (we won the Best Open Data Business in 2015) – by charging proprietary data users for access to the structured data, we can make all our data available on the website for free, and similarly make it available for free as structured data to journalists, NGOs and academics.
“It is essential to give the greatest publicity to the affairs of companies, that everyone may know on what grounds he is dealing”
Robert Lowe, later Chancellor of the Exchequer, introducing the 1856 Companies Act in the British Parliament, which made it easy to create Limited Liability Companies
We live in a global, corporate, connected world. Companies are no longer bricks-and-mortar institutions, but increasingly complex networks of legal entities that span multiple countries and jurisdictions. This is especially true for powerful global corporations, and for corporate structures used for criminal or anti-social purposes.
Few parts of the corporate world are limited to a single country, and so the world needs a way of bringing the information together in a single place, and more than that, a place that's accessible to anyone, not just those who subscribe to proprietary datasets. See also the OpenCorporates Principles
OpenCorporates (and the associated websites) is published by OpenCorporates Ltd (Registered in England, number 07444723). This acts as a social enterprise, putting the public benefit before profit. We are currently working with advisers and civil society to enshrine our public benefit mission into our corporate structure.
See Our Data
In collecting this information, and matching up to other data, OpenCorporates has acquired database rights, but we strongly believe this information should be freely reusable, and so make it available (to the extent that we have the rights) under the share-alike attribution Open Database Licence. For details, please see our licence page.
See Contributing
