If you work in M&A advisory or corporate development, the first phase of any deal is target screening. Who's active? Who's growing? Who has regulatory exposure?
Most teams default to PitchBook, Capital IQ, or Refinitiv. These work, but they're expensive, and they still miss entities that haven't raised institutional capital or filed with the SEC.
Here's what free public data actually covers -- and how to automate the boring parts.
The Data Stack for Target Screening
Secretary of State filings tell you when entities were formed, whether they're active, and what state they're registered in. If a target claims to be a Delaware corp formed in 2019, you can verify that in seconds.
- California Business Leads -- $3.50/1K results
- Texas Business Leads -- $3.50/1K results
- Florida Business Leads -- $3.50/1K results
- New York Business Leads -- $3.50/1K results
SEC EDGAR gives you 10-K/10-Q filings, insider transactions, and institutional ownership. For public companies, this is the ground truth.
- SEC EDGAR Company Filings -- $4.00/1K results
- SEC Insider Trading Tracker -- $4.00/1K results
OFAC sanctions screening is mandatory for cross-border deals.
- OFAC Sanctions Screening -- $4.00/1K results
The Workflow
- Generate initial list from SOS filings in your target states -- filter by industry keywords, formation date, entity type (LLC vs Corp)
- Cross-reference SEC for any public filings, insider activity, or institutional holders
- Run sanctions check on the entity and principals
- Pull IRS 990 data if the target is nonprofit-adjacent or has foundation subsidiaries
This takes maybe 30 minutes per batch of 50 targets, compared to hours of manual portal searching.
Why This Beats Manual Research
The real value isn't speed -- it's coverage. Manual researchers check the states they think of. Automated screening checks every state. I've seen deals where the target had undisclosed entities in states the advisory team never checked.
The tools above are all API-accessible and return structured JSON. You can pipe them into your existing workflow (Excel, Airtable, n8n, whatever).
I build data automation tools for business research. More at pink_comic on Apify.
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