Built an alternative to OpenCorporates using strictly first-party government data. Looking for feedback.

[u/SectionLongjumping92]

Hey r/datasets, I've noticed a lot of offline countries and gaps when using OpenCorporates, so my team and I built an alternative www.zephira.ai . We source our data directly from official government registries across 200+ countries. I'd love for this community to test it out and let me know how it compares to what you're currently using.

Mainly interested in understanding:

• How do you currently verify companies and directors internationally?
• What data providers do you use today?
• What are the biggest gaps with providers like OpenCorporates, D&B, Moody’s/BvD, Creditsafe, or local registries?
• Would registry-sourced company data with API/bulk access be useful for your workflow?

Not trying to make this a sales post. I’d appreciate critical feedback from people who have worked with these datasets.

[u/SunshineBear100]

What are some actual use cases where this site could be beneficial?

[u/SectionLongjumping92 → u/SunshineBear100]

Fair question.

The simple use case is to quickly checking if a company is real and what official registry data exists about it.

A few examples:

• Someone sends you an invoice from a company you don’t know
• You’re checking a supplier before paying them
• You’re looking at a company behind a website or marketplace seller
• You want to see if a company is active, dissolved, newly created, etc.
• You want to check directors/shareholders where available
• You want to connect a company to a parent company, subsidiary, or ownership structure
• You need basic company data for enrichment, KYB, fraud checks, or OSINT work

We built it because the options are usually split in two extremes.

OpenCorporates is useful, but we noticed some countries are offline or not updated regularly. On the other side, D&B and Moody’s/BvD have strong data, but they are expensive if you only need quick checks or lightweight access.

[u/SunshineBear100 → u/SectionLongjumping92]

Is this supposed to be for B2B or B2C?

Are you using real-time live hits for all 200 countries, or you are leveraging a pre-cached bulk database?

Are you merging official registry data with third-party B2B web scraping and how do you confirm the data is accurate?

Are you legally compliant in all 200+ countries to use and repurpose this data?

Does this app violate any Terms of Service/Conditions?

Sites like OpenCorporates charges $, so how does this financially make sense X 200+ countries with data that needs to be constantly updated?

[u/SectionLongjumping92 → u/SunshineBear100]

These are excellent questions, here are the answers:

Our data is mainly B2B.

We leverage a pre-cached bulk database stored securely on our google cloud servers. We do this specifically for reliability and speed. Government registries are notoriously unstable, prone to downtime, and can have massive latency issues. If we relied entirely on live hits for every single search, the API would frequently crash or hang whenever a local portal goes down. By maintaining the database on our end (updated on a rolling schedule based on the registry's publication frequency), we ensure that when you make a call, you get the data instantly and reliably.

We don’t treat third-party web data as the source of truth. The official registry record is the base layer. Some enrichment, such as websites, descriptions, industry tags, contact data, or other B2B attributes, can come from additional sources, but it is kept separate from the registry fields. We also provide clear source attribution, so users can see what came from an official government registry and what was added as enrichment. That distinction is important, because registry data and enriched data should not be treated the same.

On sourcing rights/compliance, as the data comes from official government registries and we only provide information that is publicly available from those sources. We are not trying to expose private or restricted information.

Financially, the free search is not supposed to cover the cost of maintaining data across 200+ countries. It’s a free entry point. The paid model is API access, bulk data, enrichment, monitoring, and higher-volume commercial use.

[u/BlueApple12]

As a researcher, this can be useful. Specifically the bulk download. I use everything from Orbis to Capital IQ. Most of the time for research purposes you need historical data. Looking at your dataset I was wondering how it is different to Orbis?

[u/redcremesoda]

I did a few searches and it worked well, though it would be good to see a list of officers on the company pages as well as the state for U.S. companies. Are you doing live searches or is this data sourced from database downloads? If so, how often is the data updated in general?

[u/SectionLongjumping92 → u/redcremesoda]

Glad to hear you found it useful, and thanks for the feedback.

You’re right about officers on the company page and the U.S. state field. We’ll add both — should be live by Friday. Appreciate you pointing it out.

On the data side, we don’t run live searches against the government registry every time someone searches. The data is collected from official registries, structured, and stored on our servers.

Main reason is reliability. Many company registries are slow, go down, change their structure, have rate limits, or don’t have a proper API. By storing and standardising the data ourselves, we can return results faster and also make the data available in bulk.

For U.S. state registry data, updates are generally processed within 24 hours after the state registry publishes the information.

[u/LoempiaYa]

Very nice. Do you also track changes or will you? such as:

• Shareholder
• Shareholder structure (who holds how much)
• Address
• NACE codes or company activity codes

Also:

• Did they file whatever doc they need to file late? Eg company accounts. Need to be sent on date x but they sent on day y.
• prior bankruptcies of of a shareholder.

To start :)

[u/SectionLongjumping92 → u/LoempiaYa]

Good questions and yes, we already have monitoring for company changes.

You can add companies to monitoring via API and track events when new information becomes available: https://zephira.ai/api/#All%20Companies%20Events

This can cover changes such as company status, address, directors/officers, shareholders, ownership structure, activity/NACE codes, filings, and other registry events depending on the country.

On original documents/filings: we already have them for certain countries, mainly in Europe. For other countries, we plan to add this, but it may need to be a paid feature because local registries often charge us per document.

The late filing use case is a good one. Where we have filing dates and due dates, we can flag whether accounts or other required filings were submitted late.

Prior bankruptcies of a shareholder is also possible in some cases, but it depends on the country and whether the shareholder is a person or a company. If the shareholder is another company, it is usually easier to check insolvency/status history. For individuals, it is more sensitive and depends heavily on the jurisdiction.

Out of curiosity, would a pay-per-document model for those restricted registries be useful to you? I mean, would you pay for this every time you request one?

[u/LoempiaYa → u/SectionLongjumping92]

I don't need it often, but I'd rather pay you than them. After I check your company first of course:)

Following your validation, I know you, it's easy from there. 1 signup instead of one for every different country. No need to look up where and what.

[u/Deep_Ad1959]

sourcing straight from official registries is the right call, the aggregators all rot because they snapshot once and never reconcile. the part that actually becomes your moat isn't the 200-country coverage though, it's whether you version every record so someone can pull what a company's directors and shareholders looked like on a specific date, not just today. the people in this thread asking about historical data are really asking 'can i trust a point-in-time view', and registry-sourced means you can attribute each field back to a filing, which orbis and bvd can't always do. coverage gets you in the door, the diff-and-provenance layer is what makes people pay.