A recent investigation by The Maine Wire, titled "Rep. Yusuf Yusuf Tied in to Vast Network of Million-Dollar Somali-Run Medicaid Recipients and Money Transfers," serves as a powerful example of how open company data can be used to cross-reference official government filings and uncover complex networks.
On Tuesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made a passionate pitch for European competitiveness. Speaking on the new "EU Inc" proposal to simplify cross-border business, she offered a soundbite that was clearly meant to inspire: "If we get this right — and if we move fast enough — this will not only help EU companies grow. But it will attract investment from across the world."
Today’s energy sector is evolving fast. With thousands of new companies emerging each year, keeping track of innovative startups is both a challenge and an opportunity. So how can investors, policymakers, and researchers quickly identify the most promising ventures, especially those with deep scientific expertise? In this post, I’ll walk through the methodology, share some key findings, and explain how this approach opens new doors for data-driven innovation analysis.
Manual Secretary of State (SOS) research was slowing teams down, creating data gaps, and increasing compliance risk. Relying on manual, state-by-state desktop research and ad hoc tracking was time-consuming, inconsistent, and difficult to scale, leading to outdated information and operational inefficiencies. This was why it was critical to automate access to accurate, real-time entity information as the business scaled and recovery volumes grew.
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.
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.
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.
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.