Secretary of State Business Entity Search (KYB): 9 US States

What does Secretary of State Business Entity Search do?

It's a Secretary of State business entity search across 9 states (New York, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Connecticut, Oregon, Iowa and DC), built on the official open data the states publish themselves. Use it as an LLC lookup, a company search by name or state ID, or a feed of newly formed businesses. Each result is one normalised record per company: name, state ID, entity type, status, formation date, jurisdiction and business address.

Use it two ways:

• Look up companies by name or state ID across all covered states at once.
• List new businesses: every LLC or corporation formed in the last N days, optionally in one city. Schedule it daily with Only new entities for a fresh new-business feed.

What you get

A real run with "queries": ["Blue Bottle Coffee"] across all states:

Name	State	State ID	Entity type	Status	Formed / registered	City
Blue Bottle Coffee, LLC	CO	20201746648	Foreign Other Entity	active	2020-08-27	Oakland
Blue Bottle Coffee, LLC	CT	2416198	LLC	active	2022-01-05	Oakland
BLUE BOTTLE COFFEE, LLC	TX	32083230212	Foreign Lmtd Liab Co - OOS	active	2022-02-16	Dallas
BLUE BOTTLE COFFEE, LLC	OR	188377197	Foreign Limited Liability Company	active	2021-10-20	Oakland
BLUE BOTTLE COFFEE, LLC	DC	C00005504176	Foreign Limited Liability Company	active	2016-09-06	Oakland

One company registered in several states comes back once per state, each with its own state ID and source link.

Run it on a schedule: Slack, e-mail, Google Sheets or a webhook

Set it up once and get newly formed US businesses automatically:

1. Save a task. Fill in the input (or paste the JSON below in the JSON editor) and click Save as a new task.

   { "states": ["CO"], "city": "Denver", "formedWithinDays": 3, "onlyNew": true, "monitorName": "denver-new" }
   

2. Schedule it daily. Open Schedules in the left menu of the Apify Console, create a schedule, pick the time and add your task. Each run then returns only entities that earlier runs haven't, so you pay only for new ones.
3. Send the results somewhere. In the task's Integrations tab:
   • Slack: "Send notification via Slack" when a run succeeds.
   • E-mail or Google Drive: "Send results email via Gmail" attaches the rows; "Upload results to GDrive" saves them as a file.
   • Google Sheets, CRM, n8n: connect the task through Make, Zapier or n8n (listed under Automation platforms) and add a row per result.
   • Webhook: add an HTTP webhook for the event Run succeeded with your URL. The payload includes resource.defaultDatasetId; fetch the rows from https://api.apify.com/v2/datasets/<defaultDatasetId>/items.

Who uses it

• KYB and onboarding checks: confirm a US customer or supplier exists, is active and is registered where it says it is, from the state's own data.
• New-business lead lists: every LLC and corporation formed this week in Colorado, Florida, New York, Connecticut, Oregon or DC, for insurers, banks, accountants, payroll and SaaS sales teams.
• Data enrichment: add state ID, entity type, formation date and status to a list of company names.
• AI agents: one call answers "is this company registered and active in Texas?"

Coverage

State	Source	Search by name/ID	New-business lists	Updated
New York	NY Department of State, Active Corporations (data.ny.gov)	✅	✅	frequently
Florida	Division of Corporations (Sunbiz), daily filing files	Within the date window only	✅ (last 62 days)	daily (work days)
Texas	Texas Comptroller, Active Franchise Taxpayers (data.texas.gov)	✅	⚠️ lags by weeks (refreshed periodically)	periodically
Pennsylvania	PA Department of State, Registered Businesses (data.pa.gov)	✅	❌ (no formation date published)	monthly
Colorado	Colorado Secretary of State, Business Entities (data.colorado.gov)	✅	✅	daily
Connecticut	Secretary of the State, Business Registry (data.ct.gov)	✅	✅	daily
Oregon	Oregon Secretary of State, Active Businesses (data.oregon.gov)	✅	✅	weekly
Iowa	Iowa Secretary of State, Active Iowa Business Entities (data.iowa.gov)	✅	⚠️ lags by up to a month (monthly file)	monthly
District of Columbia	DC Department of Licensing and Consumer Protection, Corporate Registration (Open Data DC)	✅ (active and inactive)	✅	regularly
Delaware, California, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, New Jersey and most other states	—	❌ not available: these states sell their registry data or put it behind an account, so there is no free open data to use

Notes:

• New York's, Oregon's and Iowa's datasets list active entities only. Most New York records carry no address (the state fills the location field for a minority of entities), so the city filter finds few New York entities.
• Texas lists active franchise taxpayers, which covers most for-profit entities doing business in Texas, including out-of-state LLCs and corporations.
• Iowa's register is published as one monthly file, which the Actor downloads (about 100 MB, around 20 seconds) the first time a run needs Iowa.
• Florida's daily files contain the filings added each day, so Florida is a feed of recent filings, not a full-register name search.

More states are added as they publish open data. Open an issue to ask for one.

How to use it

Look up companies:

{ "queries": ["Blue Bottle Coffee", "Dell Technologies"], "maxResultsPerQuery": 10 }

New LLCs formed this week in Colorado and Florida:

{ "states": ["CO", "FL"], "formedWithinDays": 7, "entityKinds": ["llc"], "maxResults": 500 }

Daily new-business feed for one city: { "states": ["CO"], "city": "Denver", "formedWithinDays": 3, "onlyNew": true, "monitorName": "denver-new" }. Save it as a task and schedule it daily.

Names match at word starts ("Dell" finds "Dell Technologies Inc." but not "Zuradell LLC"). Within each state, the closest (shortest) names are fetched first, and exact matches are ranked first.

Output example

A real record from a run:

{
  "name": "Blue Bottle Coffee, LLC",
  "state": "CT",
  "registryId": "2416198",
  "registryIdType": "Connecticut business ID",
  "entityType": "LLC",
  "entityKind": "llc",
  "status": "active",
  "statusDetail": "Active",
  "formationDate": "2022-01-05",
  "jurisdictionOfFormation": "DE",
  "address": { "street": "476 9th Street", "city": "Oakland", "state": "CA", "zip": "94607", "country": "United States" },
  "county": null,
  "sourceInfo": {
    "registry": "Connecticut Secretary of the State, Business Registry",
    "dataset": "Connecticut Business Registry - Business Master (n7gp-d28j)",
    "url": "https://service.ct.gov/business/s/onlinebusinesssearch?businessNameEn=2416198",
    "licence": "Public Domain",
    "attribution": "Source: Connecticut Secretary of the State, via data.ct.gov",
    "updateFrequency": "daily"
  },
  "query": "Blue Bottle Coffee",
  "retrievedAt": "2026-10-16T21:38:43.161Z"
}

entityKind normalises state-specific types to llc, corporation, nonprofit, partnership or other. entityType keeps the state's own label.

status is one of:

• active
• delinquent: Colorado's "Delinquent" or "Noncompliant" (the entity still exists but is behind on filings)
• inactive
• unknown

Use it from code, Make, Zapier or an AI agent

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/postatelier~us-business-entities/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "queries": ["Blue Bottle Coffee"] }'

It also works from Make, Zapier, n8n and Google Sheets through Apify's integrations. AI agents can call it through the Apify MCP server as postatelier/us-business-entities.

Pricing

Pay per event:

Event	Price
Entity returned	$0.0025 ($2.50 per 1,000 entities)

Names with no match, and entities skipped by monitoring, are free.

Examples: 1,000 entities cost $2.50. Checking a 400-name customer list in every state costs up to $10 at the default of 10 results per name; set maxResultsPerQuery: 3 to cap it at $3. A daily feed of 50 new LLCs costs about $3.75 a month. Apify's free plan includes $5 of monthly credit, which covers about 2,000 entities.

Data sources and terms

Every record carries sourceInfo.licence and sourceInfo.attribution.

State	Terms
New York	Open NY Terms of Use: reuse, including in private-sector projects, is permitted without attribution requirements
Florida	Florida public records, published by the Department of State as a free public data download ("as is"), downloaded from the Sunbiz public SFTP server with the guest credentials the state publishes
Texas	Published by the Texas Comptroller on the Texas Open Data Portal. The dataset names no specific licence; open data on the portal is published for public use
Pennsylvania	Public Domain (U.S. Government), per dataset metadata
Colorado	Public Domain, per dataset metadata
Connecticut	Public Domain, per dataset metadata
Oregon	Published by the Oregon Secretary of State, Corporation Division, on the Oregon Open Data Portal. The dataset names no specific licence
Iowa	CC BY 4.0, per dataset metadata. Attribution: Iowa Secretary of State
District of Columbia	CC BY 4.0, per dataset metadata. Attribution: DC Department of Licensing and Consumer Protection

No state website is scraped. The data comes from the states' open-data APIs and published files only.

Privacy: company data only

• Never returned: registered agents, people named for service of process, chairmen, officers, and the e-mail addresses some states publish.

• Filtered out: entity types that are individuals or are usually named after people:

  • Texas: sole proprietorships, estates, individual and general partnerships, trusts
  • Colorado: sole proprietorships, general partnerships, trusts
  • Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Iowa: general partnerships
  • Oregon: assumed business names (DBAs), which are often registered by individuals
  • Florida: declarations of trust and registered-agent designations

  Trade names held by individuals (e.g. Colorado "true names") aren't included.

• The address is the business's own principal or location address as filed with the state.

Good to know

• Speed: a name lookup queries every selected state in parallel, about 10 seconds per name, plus about 20 seconds once per run when Iowa is included.
• Florida: each day file is a few MB from the state's server, about 3 seconds per day. A 30-day window takes a little over a minute.
• Not available: officer and registered-agent data, filing documents and annual-report details. This Actor is company-level by design.

Related Actors

• UK Companies House: UK company profiles and daily new incorporations.
• European Company Registry Search: European registers with LEI and VAT checks.
• Public Tenders & Procurement: US SAM.gov federal opportunities plus EU and UK tenders.

FAQ

Why not Delaware, California or Georgia? They don't publish free open business data. Their registries are only available through paid products, accounts, or search sites whose terms forbid automated access, and we don't scrape those. We check every state's terms before adding it.

How fresh is it? It's as fresh as each state's dataset; see the coverage table. Every record shows its source and update frequency.

What if a state's source is down? The other states keep working, and a free record with status: "source_unavailable" shows which state couldn't be checked. Filter on status before importing results into a spreadsheet or CRM.

Something broke? Open an issue. A health check runs against every state daily, and we aim to fix problems within a day.