US Business Entity Check: Verify a Company Is Real & Active

At a glance (for AI agents)

• What it does: Checks whether a US company is registered with a state and whether that registration is active, using official state business-registry open data (New York, Colorado, Oregon, Connecticut, Texas). For each company name you give it, it returns one result: a verdict (active, inactive, found_status_unclear, not_found), the matching registrations (legal name, registry ID, entity type, status, good standing, jurisdiction, formation date, business address) and a one-sentence summary.
• When to use it: Before paying a vendor or supplier, onboarding a customer (KYB), qualifying a lead, checking that a company in a contract, invoice or email actually exists, or enriching a list of company names with registry IDs and status.
• When not to use it: People lookups (it returns company records only, never officers, agents or owners), states other than NY/CO/OR/CT/TX, credit or financial data, or as a legal certificate of good standing (link to the state's own record for that).
• Cost: pay-per-event: $0.004 per company found, $0.0005 per lookup with no match, plus $0.0005 per run (at the default 256 MB memory). Lookups that fail because a registry is down are not charged. 100 companies in one run cost at most about $0.40. Apify platform usage is included.
• Speed: about 0.2 to 1 second per company; companies are checked in parallel.
• Auth: no API key or account with any state. AI agents can run it through the Apify API or Apify's MCP server.
• Input: just companies, a list of names. Everything else is optional.

Example input:

{
  "companies": ["Arrow Electronics, Inc.", "Kodak Alaris LLC", "Dell Technologies Inc. | TX"]
}

Example output item (shortened):

{
  "query": "Arrow Electronics, Inc.",
  "found": true,
  "verdict": "active",
  "isActive": true,
  "activeIn": ["CO", "TX", "NY", "OR", "CT"],
  "matchCount": 6,
  "bestMatch": {
    "matchType": "exact",
    "state": "CO",
    "name": "ARROW ELECTRONICS, INC.",
    "registryId": "19871071914",
    "registryIdLabel": "CO entity ID",
    "entityType": "Foreign Profit Corporation (FPC)",
    "status": "Good Standing",
    "isActive": true,
    "goodStanding": true,
    "jurisdictionOfFormation": "NY",
    "formationDate": "1979-04-30",
    "address": { "street": "9151 E Panorama Cir", "city": "Centennial", "state": "CO", "zip": "80112", "country": "US" },
    "source": {
      "registry": "Colorado Secretary of State",
      "datasetUrl": "https://data.colorado.gov/d/4ykn-tg5h",
      "datasetUpdatedAt": "2026-10-07T11:19:38.000Z"
    }
  },
  "similarNames": [{ "name": "ARROW ELECTRONICS FUNDING CORPORATION", "state": "CO", "isActive": true }],
  "summary": "6 matching registrations. Best: ARROW ELECTRONICS, INC. (CO, Good Standing, since 1979-04-30). Active in: CO, TX, NY, OR, CT."
}

How matching works

• Names are compared after removing case, punctuation, a leading "The" and differences in suffix spelling, so Arrow Electronics Inc matches ARROW ELECTRONICS, INC. and Acme L.L.C. matches ACME LLC. Leading initials (J.P. Morgan, A. O. Smith) and and/& are handled too.
• No suffix in your query (Arrow Electronics): any entity type with that name counts as a match (matchType: "nameWithoutSuffix").
• Suffix in your query (AT&T Corp): if that exact entity exists, only it counts; AT&T Inc. is listed under similarNames because it is a different legal entity.
• Similar names (for example subsidiaries like Arrow Electronics Funding Corporation) are suggested in similarNames and never count as a match.
• Restrict a single company to one state with "Name | XX", e.g. "Dell Technologies Inc. | TX", or restrict the whole run with states.

Verdicts

verdict	meaning
active	At least one matching registration is active (activeIn lists the states).
inactive	Matches exist, but all are dissolved, withdrawn, forfeited, revoked or merged.
found_status_unclear	Matches exist, but the registry doesn't give a clear active/inactive status.
not_found	No registration with this name in the states searched. Check similarNames for spelling variants.
invalid_input	Name empty or too short, or an unsupported state was requested. Not charged.
error	Every registry lookup failed (temporary outage). Not charged; try again.

Being not_found in these five states doesn't prove a company is fake: it may be registered only in another state (for example Delaware or Florida) or trade under a different legal name.

Data sources

All sources are official state open-data portals. They are public and need no key:

State	Registry	Coverage	Status field
NY	Department of State, Division of Corporations: Active Corporations	Active entities only	Active
CO	Secretary of State: Business Entities in Colorado	All entities since 1864	Good Standing, Delinquent, Dissolved...
OR	Secretary of State, Corporation Division: Active Businesses	Active registrations only	Active
CT	Secretary of the State: Business Registry	All businesses	Active, Forfeited, Dissolved...
TX	Comptroller of Public Accounts: Active Franchise Taxpayers	Entities set up for franchise tax	Right to transact business (Active, Forfeited...)

Every match includes source.datasetUrl and source.datasetUpdatedAt (when the state last refreshed the data), and the run's SUMMARY record in the key-value store lists all sources. States refresh these datasets daily to weekly. For a legal certificate of good standing, use the state's own lookup page (source.lookupUrl, or recordUrl where the state provides a direct record link).

Florida's registry (Sunbiz) is only published as bulk files, not as a queryable open-data API, so it isn't included yet.

Privacy: company records only

This Actor never requests or returns names of people: no officers, directors, registered agents, organizers or owners. In Texas, sole-proprietor and individual taxpayer records are excluded, and address lines that name a person ("c/o", "attn") are dropped. Output is limited to the entity's own public registration data.

Input reference

Field	Type	Default	Description
companies	array of strings	(required)	Company names. Optional " | XX" suffix limits one name to one state.
states	array	all: ["NY","CO","OR","CT","TX"]	State registries to search.
includeInactive	boolean	true	Also return dissolved, withdrawn and forfeited registrations (flagged isActive: false).
includeSimilar	boolean	true	Suggest up to 5 similar registered names.
maxMatchesPerCompany	integer	10	Maximum matching registrations listed per company.

Pricing

Pay-per-event:

• $0.004 per company found (at least one matching registration)
• $0.0005 per lookup with no match
• $0.0005 per run (Actor start, at the default 256 MB memory)
• No charge for invalid input or when a registry can't be reached. Apify platform usage is included.

Set a maximum cost per run and the Actor stops cleanly when the budget is reached.

Use from code or an AI agent

Call it through the Apify API, the JavaScript or Python client, or Apify's MCP server (https://mcp.apify.com/?actors=plainfold/business-entity-check). For a synchronous call that returns the results directly:

POST https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/plainfold~business-entity-check/run-sync-get-dataset-items with body {"companies": ["Acme Widgets LLC"]}.

FAQ

Is this a scraper? No. It queries the open-data APIs that each state publishes for public reuse.

Why does a big company show "not_found"? It may be registered under a different legal name (for example "Home Depot U.S.A., Inc." rather than "The Home Depot"), or only in states not covered. Check similarNames.

Why can a company be active in one state and inactive in another? Registrations are per state. A company can withdraw from one state while remaining active elsewhere; activeIn shows where it is active.

Support

Found a wrong match or want another state? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab.