German Company KYC: Handelsregister Extract with Officers

Turn a German company name into its official register record: HRB/HRA number, register court, legal form, registered address, business purpose, share capital, representation rule and the current officers (Geschäftsführer, Vorstand, Prokura), straight from the Handelsregister. One input line per company; the actor searches the official Registerportal der Länder, picks the right entity, downloads the free structured register content and delivers it as one flat record.

Built for KYB/compliance teams onboarding German counterparties, credit and risk analysts, law firms, and B2B sellers who need to know who actually signs for a GmbH before a deal. Commercial registry resellers charge 4 euros and more per document lookup; this actor reads the same public register directly.

Why this actor

• Officers included: the structured register content lists the current Geschäftsführer, Vorstand and Prokuristen with their roles, and where the register publishes it, the representation rule (who may sign alone, who jointly).
• Precise input, precise answer: search by name, or pin the exact entity with a register number and court ("BioNTech SE, HRB 48720, Mainz"). Legal-form spellings are normalized, so "Volkswagen AG" finds "VOLKSWAGEN AKTIENGESELLSCHAFT".
• A wrong register number cannot silently deliver the wrong company: when the register entry found by number does not resemble the name you gave, the actor falls back to a name search, and any residual doubt ships flagged as nameMismatch instead of buried.
• Not-found is an answer: companies without a match come back as explicit uncharged found: false rows, so a batch reconciles line by line.
• Polite by design: one session per run, sequential rate-limited requests against the public portal, no bulk crawling. Per-query lookups only.
• Direct from the source: the Registerportal der Länder (handelsregister.de), free tier, no account, no reseller in between. Every record carries its source attribution and retrieval timestamp.

Use cases

• Counterparty onboarding (KYB): verify legal name, register number, status and signing officers before contracting.
• Credit and supplier risk: check status (active vs deleted), founding date, share capital and register history of a prospective partner.
• Sales intelligence: the Geschäftsführer of a GmbH is the decision maker; get the name from the register, not a stale database.
• Legal and M&A research: batch-verify target lists with register numbers and courts.
• AI agents: plug it into Claude, Cursor or any MCP client and ask, "who are the managing directors of this GmbH?"

Input

{
    "companies": [
        "Zalando SE",
        "BioNTech SE, HRB 48720, Mainz",
        "Musterfirma GmbH, Berlin"
    ],
    "maxMatchesPerCompany": 1
}

Each entry is a name, optionally followed by a register number and a register court, comma-separated in any order. You can also pipe a dataset from another actor; entries that are objects are read through their usual keys (name, company, companyName, firma).

Output

{
    "query": "Zalando SE",
    "found": true,
    "legalName": "Zalando SE",
    "registerType": "HRB",
    "registerNumber": "HRB 158855 B",
    "registerCourt": "Amtsgericht Berlin (Charlottenburg)",
    "status": "active",
    "legalForm": "Europäische Aktiengesellschaft (SE)",
    "seat": "Berlin",
    "address": { "street": "Valeska-Gert-Straße", "houseNumber": "5", "postalCode": "10243", "city": "Berlin", "full": "Valeska-Gert-Straße 5, 10243 Berlin" },
    "businessPurpose": "...",
    "shareCapital": { "amount": 250249984, "currency": "EUR" },
    "representationRule": "...",
    "officers": [
        { "role": "Vorstand", "name": "Robert Gentz", "city": "Berlin", "birthDate": "..." }
    ],
    "source": "handelsregister.de (Registerportal der Länder, free structured register content)",
    "retrievedAt": "2026-07-17T10:00:00.000Z"
}

Pricing

You pay per company record actually extracted, plus a small run start fee. Not-found rows are free. Registry document resellers charge 4 to 12 euros per extract; this actor delivers the free structured register content for a fraction of that.

FAQ

Is this the official register? Yes. The data comes from the Registerportal der Länder at handelsregister.de, the joint public portal of the German federal states, which has been free to access since 2022. The actor reads the free structured register content ("SI" documents); it never buys paid documents (AD/CD/HD chronological or historical prints).

What if the free tier does not expose something? Then the record honestly omits it. Fields like share capital or representation rule appear when the register publishes them for that entity; officers are included for virtually all active companies.

Why did a query come back with nameMismatch: true? The register number you provided points at an entity whose name does not resemble the name you gave, and no better name match was found. Check the register number; two entities are never behind one number, so one of the two inputs is off.

How fast is it? Deliberately unhurried. The portal is a shared public service, so the actor paces its requests (about 1.5 seconds between calls) and processes companies sequentially. Plan roughly 8 to 15 seconds per company.

Is this GDPR-compliant? Officer names in the Handelsregister are published by law for legal certainty in commerce (§ 9 HGB). This actor only reads what the register makes public. As the user of the data you are responsible for your own lawful basis and for using it in line with GDPR, especially for direct marketing.