Yesterday we had a minor celebration in the OpenCorporates office. For days the data team have had one eye on our company counter, as it approached the 180 million mark, with frequent updates across the office and on our messaging systems reporting the latest query output from ElasticSearch, and at 15:49 BST yesterday we hit it.
Much of the increase comes from the daily work of refreshing our data from company registers, and adding newly incorporated companies but we’ve also seen a significant increase in the number of French companies, due to the official register adding inactive/dissolved companies going back to 1973. This has effectively doubled the number of French companies available to over 20 million. We have also now included over 600,000 companies from eight French overseas territories including La Réunion, Guadeloupe and Martinique. Look out for a blog post specifically on this dataset shortly.
In eight years we have come a long way and aren’t slowing up: we only reached the 150m mark in July last year. In fact, we are now in the middle of a huge piece of work, supported by a grant from The Mohn Westlake Foundation, that will allow us to accelerate the increase in the breadth, depth and freshness of data we source. We’ll be blogging about this in the coming months, but it involves a complete reengineering of how we source, QA and consume official data, powered by an upfront investment in our processes, tools and technologies and adding resource and expertise to the team.
If you’d like to join us in this exciting task, head over to our recruitment pages at https://jobs.opencorporates.com/.
p.s. We are delighted to say that we have also been shortlisted for Best Entity Data Solution at this year’s Data Management Insight Awards. Please support our important work by voting here.
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