If you work in corp dev, PE, or M&A advisory, you know the drill: before any deal closes, someone has to manually pull entity filings from Secretary of State portals, cross-reference SEC EDGAR for public filings, and check IRS 990s if there's a nonprofit angle.
This takes paralegals days. LexisNexis charges thousands per engagement. And half the time, the data is stale by the time the memo lands.
Every one of these data sources is public. The bottleneck is access and aggregation, not availability.
The due diligence data stack
Here's what a typical target company check requires:
1. Secretary of State entity verification
Confirm the target is in good standing, check filing history, identify registered agents, and find related entities.
- California Business Leads — search CA SOS by entity name or number. Returns status, formation date, agent info.
- Texas Business Leads — TX Comptroller entity search. Taxpayer info, SOS status, addresses.
- New York Business Leads — NY DOS entity search. Filing history and current status.
- Florida Business Leads — Sunbiz daily filings and entity search.
- US Business Entity Search — multi-state entity lookup.
2. SEC EDGAR filings
For public targets or targets with public debt, pull 10-K, 10-Q, 8-K, and proxy filings.
- SEC EDGAR Company Filings — search by company name or CIK. Returns filing type, date, and direct document links. $3.50/1K results.
- SEC Insider Trading Tracker — Form 4 filings showing insider buys/sells.
3. Nonprofit and tax-exempt verification
If the target or any subsidiary has 501(c) status, pull 990 returns.
- IRS 990 Nonprofit Search — search by EIN or org name. Returns revenue, assets, key personnel, and filing history.
- Nonprofit Explorer — ProPublica nonprofit data with financial summaries.
4. Supplementary checks
- OFAC Sanctions Screening — check target principals against the SDN list.
- FDIC BankFind — if the target is a financial institution, verify charter status.
- Federal Audit Clearinghouse — single audit data for entities receiving federal funds.
Automating the pipeline
Instead of running each check manually:
- Input: target company name + state of incorporation
- Run SOS entity search for the relevant state
- Run SEC EDGAR search by company name
- Run IRS 990 search if nonprofit indicators are present
- Run OFAC screening on key principals
- Aggregate results into a single JSON or spreadsheet
With n8n or Make.com, this entire workflow runs in under 5 minutes for a single target. For portfolio-level screening, batch process overnight.
Cost comparison
| Source | LexisNexis/Manual | API approach |
|---|---|---|
| SOS entity check (5 states) | $50-200/entity | $0.02-0.05/entity |
| SEC EDGAR filings | $100+/search | $0.004/result |
| IRS 990 lookup | $25-50/org | $0.003/result |
| OFAC screening | $5-15/name | $0.003/result |
Total per-target diligence cost drops from $200-400 to under $1.
I build data automation tools for M&A research, compliance, and business intelligence. More at dev.to/avabuildsdata.
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