2025 – OpenCorporates

Delaware is “losing incorporations”? Our data shows a different story

Delaware’s incorporations are still growing in absolute terms. Our data shows Delaware’s total recorded companies rising from 5.02m (Nov 2023) to 5.30m (Nov 2024) to 5.62m (Nov 2025), a ~10% increase over two years. The real change is in where new, small entities (especially LLCs) are being formed. Our December 2024 blog series documents that Wyoming overtook Delaware in new incorporations on a per‑capita basis, powered by a nationwide explosion in LLCs. High‑profile “DEXIT” reincorporations are happening, but they don’t equal an overall collapse. After court‑driven flashpoints, some large companies announced moves (e.g., Tesla and SpaceX), a visible but numerically limited subset of total formations.

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December 16, 2025

Reading List / Resources

15 years of corporate transparency: The ultimate resource list

Fifteen years ago, Chris Taggart founded OpenCorporates with a simple mission: to make legal-entity data transparent and reliable. Today, that mission is more critical than ever. We've built the foundation for the first step of any transaction; verifying a legitimate business from its primary source, such as Secretaries of State and Companies House. OpenCorporates was an early innovator in this space, establishing itself as the most trusted source for legal-entity data, anchored in our seven Legal-Entity Data Principles. This commitment to provenance and quality is what sets our data apart.

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December 10, 2025

Compliance / Data Access

When auditors ask “where did this data come from?” Can you answer?

Provenance means the ability to trace every data point back to its official source with timestamps. This capability addresses the trust gap in business data by providing clear lineage for compliance decisions. This article examines why data transparency has become essential for compliance operations, how leading organizations implement it, and what it means for business data management.

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November 18, 2025

Entity Verification / Resources

How to map company networks using the OpenCorporates API + Relationships File

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.

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October 28, 2025

Community

OpenCorporates brings world’s largest open company database to Money20/20 USA

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.

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October 17, 2025

Risk Management / Supply Chain Risk

The tequila heist that exposed supply chain fraud – and the fake companies behind it

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.

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October 14, 2025

Compliance / Risk Management

Making sense of risk with legal-entity knowledge graphs

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.

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October 1, 2025

Data Access / Data Aggregators

What you need to know before sourcing data directly from US state registries

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.

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September 15, 2025

FinTech / KYB

Scaling KYB across borders: Practical lessons from automating business verification

When onboarding moves beyond one market, the first thing to break isn’t your policy, it’s the process around it. This post shares what we’ve learned helping risk & compliance teams verify businesses globally, with practical steps you can drop straight into your roadmap. The result is fewer manual reviews, faster time‑to‑decision, and an audit trail you actually trust.

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August 18, 2025

Entity Verification / Real Estate

Why unmasking corporate property ownership is the next frontier for commercial real estate data

Portfolio owners, lenders, and prop-tech platforms are all grappling with the same fundamental problem: how do you make smart investment and lending decisions when you can't see who really owns what?

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August 1, 2025