If you are a banker or business lender, you are required to verify businesses with their Secretary of State. Every state has a different portal, search process, and data structure. This product allows you to do it in one location with normalized data.
Hello everyone!
I'm excited to share this small, free tool today.
If you have ever opened a business bank account or applied for a business loan, you will probably have seen your banker ask what your business name is and then navigate to your Secretary of State website and search for that business. They are required to do this as part of their anti-money laundering efforts.
This tool centralizes that search.
Anyone needing to verify a business that is registered with a United States Secretary of State can do so with only the business name and the state where the business is registered. It returns the data in a normalized format and offers the option to download it as a CSV or copy it to your clipboard as JSON.
While we make every effort to improve the speed of these searches, we are searching the Secretary of State's database in real time.
That means if you search somewhere like New York we can probably get the data back to you in a matter of seconds.
If you search somewhere like Delaware, you're probably closer to 3 minutes. Ouch, we know. Delaware Secretary of State site is not the smoothest experience and that rolls back to this tool, unfortunately.
We also are constantly toeing the line between simplicity and more accurate data. Currently we compare the search query and the Secretary of State's responses. If it includes the search query and is active, we return that business. This works great when you are searching for an exact business, such as "Microsoft Corporation" in Washington. It does not work so well when you search for "Microsoft", where the first active result will be "Microsoft Alumni Network."
Verify a Business
Verify a Business