DEV Community: Ava Torres

How VC Analysts Use Public Data for Startup Due Diligence Without a Bloomberg Terminal

Ava Torres — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 22:57:34 +0000

How VC Analysts Use Public Data for Startup Due Diligence (Without Paying for a Bloomberg Terminal)

Due diligence in venture capital is an interesting data problem. You're evaluating companies that are mostly private, often pre-revenue, and frequently operating in markets where the standard signals — audited financials, public filings, established customer bases — don't exist yet.

But there's more public data about early-stage companies than most analysts realize. Legal entity registrations, patent filings, clinical trial registrations, SEC crowdfunding disclosures, founder employment histories — these are all public record. The gap is tooling that makes them queryable at the speed diligence actually moves.

This post covers the workflows I've seen work well for pre-investment research on startups, particularly in tech, biotech, and deep tech.

What You're Actually Trying to Answer

The questions in VC due diligence roughly cluster into:

Does the team have the credentials they claim? (Founder background, patent authorship, prior employment)
Is the technology real and defensible? (Patents filed, clinical trial registrations, regulatory submissions)
Is the company properly formed and clean? (Legal entity status, cap table signals, SOS registrations)
Who else is in this space and how far ahead are they? (Competitor patent analysis, public market comps, SEC filings for public players)
What does the market structure look like? (Public company financials, contract awards, regulatory trends)

Public data addresses pieces of all five. It won't replace reference calls or technical diligence — but it frontloads the screening work so you spend reference call time on harder questions.

Workflow 1: Verifying the Legal Entity and Early Corporate History

Step 1: Confirm the Entity Is Properly Formed

This sounds basic but it catches problems. Check the startup's legal entity registration in its state of incorporation (usually Delaware) and its state of operation.

For California-based startups: california-business-leads

For Texas: texas-business-leads

For New York: new-york-ucc-lien-search (UCC liens show secured debt against company assets)

What to look for:

Formation date vs. founding story — if the pitch deck says "founded 2021" but the entity was formed in 2023, ask why
Entity type — most serious startups incorporate as Delaware C-corps for VC compatibility; an LLC or S-corp at Series A is unusual
UCC filings — secured creditors filing UCC-1s against a company mean someone has a senior claim on assets; this shows up in the cap table conversation

Step 2: Check for Prior Entities Under Founder Names

Founders who've had previous ventures sometimes have entity registrations (or dissolutions) that don't appear on their LinkedIn. Running founder names through state SOS databases surfaces prior company affiliations, dissolution history, and sometimes litigation history.

This is slower to automate since you're searching by individual name rather than company name, but for lead partners doing final diligence on a term sheet, it's worth the 30 minutes.

Workflow 2: Patent and IP Landscape Analysis

Step 1: Pull the Company's Patent Portfolio

For any startup where IP is part of the moat, verifying what's actually filed (vs. what the deck claims) is table stakes.

uspto-patents-patentsview-search queries the USPTO PatentsView database, which covers granted US patents and published applications. Search by assignee (company name) to see their full patent portfolio — what's granted, what's pending, and when it was filed.

Key questions:

Are patents assigned to the company or to the founders personally? (Personal assignment is a red flag pre-investment — founders can walk with the IP)
When were they filed? Filed two weeks before the pitch is a different signal than filed two years ago
What's the claims language? Broad, enforceable claims are very different from narrow ones

Step 2: Map the Competitive Patent Landscape

This is where it gets more useful. Run the same search against competitor names and you get a picture of who holds what IP in the space. If a potential investment is building in an area where a large incumbent has 400 patents and your startup has 3, that's a diligence conversation you want to have explicitly.

You can also search by inventor name — if the startup's technical founders are listed as inventors on prior patents (at a previous employer), understanding what was licensed vs. what was independently developed matters.

Workflow 3: Clinical Trial and Regulatory Status (Biotech/MedTech)

For life sciences investments, clinical trial registration data is one of the highest-signal public datasets available.

Step 1: Pull the Trial Registry

clinicaltrials-gov-search queries ClinicalTrials.gov, the NIH registry of clinical studies. Every trial the FDA requires to be registered appears here — including phase, enrollment status, primary endpoints, and study results if available.

Search by sponsor name (the company) to pull all their registered trials. What to verify:

Enrollment status — is the trial actually enrolling, or was it registered and then stalled?
Primary endpoint — what they're measuring, and whether it's a regulatory endpoint the FDA will accept for approval
Expected completion date vs. actual — delays are common; large delays without explanation warrant a question
Results publications — if Phase 2 is complete, are results posted? Unpublished results from completed trials is a yellow flag

Step 2: Check FDA 510(k) Clearances for Medical Devices

For medtech investments claiming cleared devices: fda-510k-medical-device-clearances lets you query the 510(k) clearance database by company name or device classification.

If a device startup claims FDA clearance and their device isn't in the 510(k) database, that conversation needs to happen before term sheet. The most common explanation is that the device was cleared under a previous company name (post-acquisition or rebranding) — but you want to confirm.

Workflow 4: Incumbent and Market Structure Analysis

Step 1: Pull Public Competitor Filings

For any market with public company comparables, SEC EDGAR tells you more about market structure than most analyst reports.

sec-edgar-company-filings lets you pull 10-Ks, 10-Qs, and 8-Ks by company name or ticker. For early-stage diligence, the most useful sections of a public company 10-K are:

Business section — how they describe the competitive landscape (useful for understanding what they're worried about)
Risk factors — what the public incumbent considers its existential risks (often maps directly to where startups are attacking)
Customer concentration disclosures — which customers matter and what the loss of one would mean

This is also where you find material weakness disclosures, regulatory risk language, and forward guidance — all relevant for understanding where an incumbent is vulnerable.

Step 2: Track Insider Transactions

For public competitors, sec-insider-trading-tracker surfaces Form 4 filings showing when executives buy or sell shares. Heavy executive selling at a competitor is sometimes a leading indicator of problems that haven't hit public disclosure yet. It's circumstantial, but it's a data point.

Step 3: Check Federal Contract Awards in the Sector

For enterprise, defense tech, or govtech plays, usaspending-federal-spending-search shows which companies are actually winning government contracts in the space. This tells you who the government is already paying and at what scale — useful for sizing the addressable market and understanding where your investment would need to compete.

What Public Data Can't Tell You

Being clear about limits is part of doing this well:

Private company financials — if the startup isn't publicly traded or hasn't filed with the SEC (Reg CF, Reg A), you're not getting audited financials from public records. You'll need to rely on what the company provides.
Customer references — no database tells you whether the product actually works or whether customers would re-buy. Reference calls remain irreplaceable.
Team dynamics — whether the cofounders will still be speaking in 18 months doesn't show up in any filing.

What public data gives you is the ability to verify what you're told, surface what you weren't told, and ask better questions when you do speak to the team. In a world where founders have become very good at pitching, the ability to walk into a reference call already knowing the IP ownership structure, the trial status, and the SEC filings of their largest competitor is a real edge.

Practical Setup

If you're doing this regularly, set up a pipeline that runs the SOS check, patent search, and clinical trial query in parallel as soon as a new deal enters the pipeline. The whole thing can run in under five minutes and flags the issues worth investigating before you've burned analyst time on a deeper review.

All the actors referenced here are queryable via Apify's API, so they integrate directly into a deal tracking workflow — CRM webhook triggers a pipeline run, outputs land in a Google Sheet or Notion database, associate reviews flags before the first partner meeting.

Actors mentioned in this post are available on Apify under pink_comic. All query public government data sources.

A Data Engineer's Guide to Tracing Corporate Ownership and Political Money

Ava Torres — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 22:56:49 +0000

A Data Engineer's Guide to Tracing Corporate Ownership and Political Money (With Public Records APIs)

I've done a fair amount of contract work for journalists and researchers over the years, helping them turn document dumps and public databases into structured, queryable datasets. The work is genuinely interesting — and it's made me appreciate how much signal is sitting in government databases that most people never touch programmatically.

This post is for investigative reporters, data journalists, and researchers who are comfortable with basic scripting and want to build repeatable workflows for the kinds of questions that come up constantly: Who owns this company? Who's funding this politician? What lobbyists are pushing this legislation? Which contractors are getting paid for what?

The good news: almost all of this data is public and accessible via API or scraping. The bad news: the government's idea of "accessible" and a journalist's idea of "accessible" are pretty different. Here's how to bridge that gap.

The Data Sources That Actually Matter

Before getting into workflows, here's a map of what's available and what it's good for:

Source	What It Contains	Best For
SEC EDGAR	Corporate filings: 10-Ks, proxies, 13F holdings, 8-Ks	Corporate ownership, financials, related-party transactions
FEC	Campaign contributions, PAC filings, independent expenditures	Political money, donor networks
Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA)	Lobbyist registrations, quarterly activity reports	Influence mapping, issue tracking
USASpending.gov	Federal contracts and grants	Contractor spending, agency priorities
Secretary of State records	Business registrations	Shell company tracing, beneficial ownership clues
RECAP/PACER	Federal court dockets	Litigation history, sealed filings, corporate disputes

The challenge isn't that this data is hidden — it's that each database has its own interface, its own quirks, and its own way of representing the same underlying entities. Connecting them is the work.

Workflow 1: Tracing Corporate Ownership Through SEC Filings

When you need to understand who owns what, SEC EDGAR is the most reliable public source for US public companies.

Step 1: Pull the 13F Holdings

Investment managers with more than $100M in assets under management must file 13F reports quarterly disclosing their equity holdings. This is how you trace which funds own significant stakes in which companies.

sec-edgar-company-filings lets you query EDGAR by company name, CIK number, or filing type. Search for a company's CIK, then pull their latest proxy statement (DEF 14A) to see major shareholders, executive compensation, and related-party transactions.

Step 2: Follow the Proxy Disclosures

Proxy statements are where the real ownership disclosures live. They name shareholders with more than 5% of outstanding shares (required by SEC rules), the compensation arrangements for named executives, and any transactions between the company and parties related to its management.

If you're investigating a private equity-backed company, the proxy won't exist — but an 8-K filed at the time of acquisition often names the acquirer and deal structure.

Step 3: Cross-Reference with State Business Registrations

Public company filings show the structure at the top. But subsidiaries, operating entities, and holding companies are often registered at the state level and don't appear in EDGAR.

Use state SOS data to trace the full entity tree:

california-business-leads
texas-business-leads
new-york-ucc-lien-search (New York UCC filings also show secured creditors)

Search for the holding company name across multiple states. LLCs created to hold real assets are often formed in Delaware, Nevada, or Wyoming for liability and disclosure reasons — but they may have registered foreign qualifications in the states where they operate.

Workflow 2: Mapping Political Donations and Influence Networks

Step 1: Start With FEC Filings

The FEC database contains every federal campaign contribution above $200, every PAC filing, and every independent expenditure. It's comprehensive, it's public, and it's deeply underused.

fec-campaign-finance-search lets you query contributions by donor name, employer, ZIP code, committee, or candidate. This is how you find the full picture of where an individual's or organization's political money is going — across multiple cycles, across multiple candidates, across direct contributions and PAC money.

Start with a company name in the employer field. You'll see which employees are giving to which candidates. Combine that with executive names to trace individual giving patterns.

Step 2: Follow the Lobbying Money

Contributions are only part of the influence picture. Lobbying is often the more direct lever.

The Lobbying Disclosure Act requires lobbyists to register and file quarterly activity reports disclosing their clients, the issues they're lobbying on, and estimated spending. lobbying-disclosure-search makes this queryable.

Search by company name to see what issues they're paying lobbyists to push. Search by issue keyword to see who's lobbying on a particular bill or regulatory matter. The combination of FEC contributions and LDA lobbying disclosures gives you a fairly complete picture of a company's political engagement.

Step 3: Check Federal Contractor Spending

If the company also receives federal contracts, usaspending-federal-spending-search connects the loop. You can see who's paying lobbyists to influence legislation while simultaneously receiving government contracts — a pattern worth examining in a lot of industries.

USASpending data includes contract award amounts, agency, recipient, and place of performance. It's not perfect (there are known data quality issues with some agency reporting), but it's the most complete public picture of federal contractor spending.

Workflow 3: Tracking Legislation and Regulatory Actions

Step 1: Follow Bills Through Congress

congress-gov-legislation-tracker lets you search bills by keyword, sponsor, committee, or status. For a beat reporter covering a specific industry or issue, setting up a keyword alert on new bills introduced in a relevant committee is basic infrastructure.

Step 2: Watch the Federal Register

Regulations often have more real-world impact than legislation — and they move through a more predictable process. federal-register-search lets you search proposed and final rules by agency, topic, or date.

The notice-and-comment period is where lobbying money gets translated into regulatory language. Searching the Federal Register for rules that affect your coverage area, then cross-referencing who submitted comments (via regulations.gov) and who was lobbying on the same issues (via LDA), is a productive way to trace influence.

Step 3: Pull Court Dockets for Enforcement History

Federal enforcement actions show up as civil or criminal cases in PACER. recap-federal-court-dockets gives you access to RECAP's archive of PACER documents, which is the best free alternative to expensive PACER fees.

Search by party name to find all federal litigation involving a company or individual. This is how you find the SEC enforcement case that settled quietly, the DOJ investigation that never made the news, and the civil fraud suits that preceded the bankruptcy.

Connecting the Dots

The real value isn't any single data source — it's the network that emerges when you connect them. A lobbyist who represents a company also made personal donations to the committee chair overseeing that company's regulatory environment, who awarded a contract to a firm where the lobbyist is a senior partner.

None of that is in any single database. All of it is in public records. The work is joining them.

A few practical notes:

Entity name matching is the hard part. "Goldman Sachs Group Inc." and "Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC" are related but distinct legal entities. Budget time for fuzzy matching and manual disambiguation.
FEC employer field is self-reported. "Goldman Sachs," "Goldman," "GS," and "Goldman Sachs Bank" all appear in FEC data for the same institution. Query broadly, normalize in post-processing.
LDA filings lag by a quarter. You won't see Q4 lobbying activity until February. Factor that into your publication timeline.
EDGAR filings are machine-readable but inconsistently formatted. XBRL data is cleaner than raw 10-K text; use the structured filing types where possible.

The tools are there. The data is public. Building the workflow is the journalist's actual edge.

Actors mentioned in this post run on Apify. Each one queries the underlying government API or database and returns structured JSON — no scraping gray areas, just public data made queryable.

How Supply Chain Risk Managers Use Public Data to Vet Suppliers Before It's Too Late

Ava Torres — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 22:56:43 +0000

How Supply Chain Risk Managers Use Public Data to Vet Suppliers Before It's Too Late

Supply chain risk is finally getting the board-level attention it deserves. After a few years of high-profile collapses — sanctions violations, FDA enforcement actions, shell company fraud — procurement teams are being asked to do what compliance teams have been doing for a decade: verify before you trust.

The problem is that most supplier vetting tools are either too expensive to use at scale or too shallow to catch the issues that actually matter. A vendor portal that checks a company name against a list is not due diligence. Real vetting means pulling business registration data, checking sanctions lists, reviewing regulatory enforcement history, and understanding who actually controls the entity you're about to send a purchase order to.

This post walks through how I've built automated supplier screening workflows using public government data sources — the same data that enterprise compliance platforms resell at 10x markup.

Why Public Data Covers More Than You Think

The US government publishes a remarkable amount of supplier-relevant data for free:

OFAC SDN List — Treasury's sanctions blacklist. If a supplier or its beneficial owner appears here, transacting with them is a federal crime.
FDA enforcement records — Warning letters, 510(k) clearance status, recall notices. Critical for anyone sourcing medical devices, food ingredients, or pharmaceutical components.
SAM.gov debarment records — Suppliers debarred from federal contracting. A useful proxy for serious fraud or compliance failures even if you're not a government contractor.
Secretary of State registrations — Confirms the entity is legally registered, identifies registered agents, and surfaces shell company red flags (single-member LLCs with no physical address, recently-formed entities, etc.).
SEC EDGAR filings — For publicly-traded suppliers or their parent companies, financial health, related-party transactions, and material risk disclosures.

The challenge has always been that these databases don't talk to each other. You'd have to manually query five different portals for every supplier review. Automating that is exactly where this gets interesting.

The Screening Workflow

Here's the workflow I use for Tier 1 supplier onboarding. It takes about 15 minutes of setup per supplier run and can process a batch of 50 suppliers in parallel.

Step 1: Confirm the Entity Exists and Is Registered

Before anything else, verify the company is a real, active legal entity — not a shell formed last month or a doing-business-as name with no legal registration behind it.

For California-based suppliers: california-business-leads

For Texas suppliers: texas-business-leads

For Florida: sunbiz-florida-business-leads

For New Jersey: new-jersey-business-leads

Run the supplier's legal name through the relevant state SOS. What you're looking for:

Status: Active — not dissolved, revoked, or administratively suspended
Formation date — a company formed three months ago asking for a $2M PO is a red flag
Registered agent — mass-registered agents (like CT Corporation) are normal; a random individual with a PO box is worth a second look
Entity type — an LLC with one member and no operating history warrants more scrutiny than a 10-year-old C-corp

Step 2: Run OFAC Sanctions Screening

This is non-negotiable. If your supplier, its owners, or its parent company appears on the OFAC Specially Designated Nationals list, you have a legal problem, not just a business risk problem.

Use ofac-sanctions-screening to query the SDN list by company name, individual name, or country. The actor returns match scores, so you can set a threshold (e.g., flag anything above 80% similarity for manual review) and process bulk lists without hitting the Treasury website hundreds of times.

Screen the company name, any parent company names, and — if you have them — the names of beneficial owners or executives.

Step 3: Check FDA Enforcement History (for Regulated Goods)

If you source anything that touches FDA jurisdiction — food ingredients, packaging, medical components, cosmetics, dietary supplements — this step is essential.

openfda-drug-adverse-events-recalls pulls FDA recall notices by company name. Cross-reference with fda-510k-medical-device-clearances to verify that any device components your supplier claims are cleared are actually in the 510(k) database.

A supplier claiming FDA clearance for a device that doesn't appear in the 510(k) database is either confused or lying. Either way, you want to know before the purchase order is signed.

Step 4: Pull SEC Filings for Public Companies or Their Parents

For larger suppliers or those with publicly-traded parent companies, SEC EDGAR is a goldmine. sec-edgar-company-filings lets you pull 10-Ks, 10-Qs, 8-Ks, and proxy statements by ticker or company name.

What to look for:

Going concern language in the 10-K — a supplier under financial stress may not be able to fulfill orders six months from now
Related-party transactions — are they doing business with entities controlled by their own executives in ways that look like self-dealing?
Material weakness disclosures — internal control failures are a leading indicator of future compliance problems
8-K filings — sudden leadership departures, regulatory investigations, and major contract losses show up here before they hit the news

Step 5: Check SAM.gov for Debarment

Even if you're not a government contractor, the SAM.gov exclusions list is a useful compliance signal. Suppliers excluded from federal contracting have typically committed fraud, failed to perform, or been found to have violated labor or environmental laws.

sam-gov-contract-opportunities lets you search the SAM.gov database. Cross-check your supplier list against active exclusions before onboarding.

What This Catches That Vendor Portals Miss

Most vendor management portals do a name-match against a sanctions list and call it due diligence. That catches obvious hits. It misses:

A supplier that's clean on OFAC but whose parent company is sanctioned
A company with an active recall in a product category adjacent to yours
A financially distressed supplier whose 10-K buried a going-concern opinion
An entity formed 60 days ago with no regulatory history

Combining SOS registration data, OFAC screening, FDA enforcement records, and SEC filings gives you a materially more complete picture — and it's all public data.

Practical Notes

A few things I've learned running this in production:

Entity name matching is harder than it looks. "Acme Corp" and "Acme Corporation" are the same company. "Acme Group LLC" might not be. Build fuzzy matching into your pipeline, not exact string comparison.
Run screening at onboarding AND on a periodic refresh cycle. A supplier that was clean 18 months ago may have been sanctioned or debarred since. Quarterly rescreening for Tier 1 suppliers is a reasonable cadence.
Document your methodology. If you're ever in front of a regulator explaining why you continued to source from a sanctioned entity, "we ran an automated screen quarterly using public OFAC data" is a better defense than "we checked when we onboarded them."

The tools exist. The data is public. The gap is the workflow to connect them — and that's exactly what this kind of automation closes.

All actors mentioned run on Apify. You can try them individually or chain them into a single workflow using Apify's dataset and webhook system.

How AML Compliance Officers Screen Business Entities Using Public Records

Ava Torres — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 22:22:18 +0000

I spent a year building data pipelines for a fintech that processed business payments. The compliance team's KYB workflow was: check OFAC, check the sanctions list, maybe Google the company name, approve. They were clearing 200 applications a week and felt good about their throughput.

Then a bank examiner asked them to demonstrate how they verified the legal existence of the entities they were approving. Silence.

That's when we rebuilt the screening workflow using public records. Here's what that looks like.

Why Sanctions Screening Isn't Enough

BSA/AML compliance requires that financial institutions "know your business" -- verify that a business customer is who they claim to be, that the entity legally exists, and that the beneficial ownership structure is transparent.

Most compliance teams treat KYB as a checkbox: run the name against OFAC's SDN list and a commercial sanctions database. If nothing comes back, approve.

The problem is that shell companies, front entities, and stale registrations don't show up on sanctions lists. They show up in state filings that nobody checks.

A proper entity screening workflow pulls from multiple public sources:

State Secretary of State filings -- Does the entity legally exist? Is it in good standing?
SEC filings -- Is there beneficial ownership or insider transaction data?
FDIC records -- Is the claimed bank actually FDIC-insured?
Domain registration -- When was the company's website registered? By whom?

None of these are sanctions checks. All of them are red-flag generators that a good compliance program should be running.

Step 1: Verify Entity Registration in State Filings

The most basic KYB check -- and the one most often skipped -- is confirming the entity is registered and active in the state it claims to operate from.

Secretary of State business filings tell you:

Entity status -- Active, Dissolved, Revoked, Suspended. A business applicant whose entity is dissolved in its home state is an immediate escalation.
Formation date -- an entity formed last week that claims 10 years of operating history is a discrepancy worth investigating.
Officer and registered agent information -- does it match what the applicant provided? Mismatches are a flag.
Entity type -- LLC, Corp, LP. Does it match the application? A sole prop claiming to be a Corp is either confused or misrepresenting.

I built scrapers for the states where most business entities are registered:

Search by entity name or filing number. You get back status, formation date, registered agent, and officer details. Run this on every business applicant as part of intake -- it takes seconds per entity via API.

Step 2: Check SEC Filings for Ownership and Disclosure

If the entity or its parent is publicly traded, SEC filings provide a layer of verification that's hard to fabricate:

Beneficial ownership filings (Schedule 13D/13G) -- who holds significant positions
Insider transaction reports (Form 4) -- recent buying or selling by officers and directors
Annual reports (10-K) -- subsidiary lists, related party transactions, legal proceedings

SEC EDGAR Company Filings Search -- search by company name or CIK. For business applicants that claim to be subsidiaries of public companies, pull the parent's 10-K and verify the subsidiary is actually listed.

This catches a specific type of fraud: entities that claim affiliation with well-known companies but have no actual relationship.

Step 3: Verify Banking Relationships with FDIC Records

If a business applicant claims to hold accounts at a specific bank, or if the applicant itself claims to be a bank or financial institution, FDIC BankFind data provides verification.

FDIC BankFind Search -- search by institution name or FDIC certificate number. Confirm the institution is active, FDIC-insured, and that the charter type matches what was represented.

This matters especially for money service businesses and payment processors that claim banking relationships as part of their compliance posture.

Step 4: Check Domain Registration History

This is the check that catches the most blatant red flags. A business applicant with a 10-year operating history whose website domain was registered 3 weeks ago is worth a conversation.

WHOIS Domain Lookup -- input the applicant's website domain. You get registration date, registrant information (when not privacy-protected), and nameserver details.

What to look for:

Registration date vs. claimed operating history -- large gaps are a flag
Registrant country -- if the applicant claims to be a US company but the domain is registered through a foreign registrar with privacy protection, that's context worth having
Recent registration changes -- a domain that changed hands recently may indicate the entity was recently created or acquired

The Screening Workflow

For every business entity application:

State SOS check -- verify the entity exists, is active, and formation date matches the application.
SEC check (if applicable) -- verify any claimed public company affiliations.
FDIC check (if applicable) -- verify any claimed banking relationships.
WHOIS check -- verify domain registration date against claimed operating history.
Flag discrepancies for manual review. Pass clean applications.

Steps 1-4 can run in parallel via API calls. Total screening time per entity: under 30 seconds. Total cost: a few cents per entity.

This doesn't replace sanctions screening. It supplements it with the kind of entity verification that examiners actually ask about -- and that most compliance programs skip until it's too late.

How Government Contractors Use Federal Spending Data for Competitive Intelligence

Ava Torres — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 22:21:28 +0000

A BD director at a mid-size defense contractor told me his team spends the first two days of every capture effort manually pulling competitor data from USASpending, SAM.gov, and the Federal Register. Contract values, incumbent names, period of performance, small business set-aside status. All public. All available programmatically. All being copied into spreadsheets by hand.

I helped him automate it. Here's the workflow.

Why Competitive Intelligence Matters in GovCon

Government contracting is one of the few industries where your competitors' revenue is public record. Every federal contract award -- who won, how much, what agency, what NAICS code -- is published on USASpending.gov. The problem isn't access. The problem is that most firms treat this data as something you look up occasionally instead of something you monitor continuously.

The firms that win consistently know:

Who's winning contracts in their NAICS codes and at which agencies
What price points are winning (total value, annual value, per-unit pricing when available)
Which incumbents are coming up for recompete in the next 12-18 months
What regulatory changes might create new requirements or shift existing ones

All of this is free. You just need to pull it systematically.

Step 1: Map Competitor Contract Portfolios

Start with USASpending. Every federal contract over $10K is reported here with the recipient name, awarding agency, NAICS code, award amount, and period of performance.

USASpending Federal Spending Search lets you search by recipient name, keyword, agency, or NAICS code. Pull every award for your top 5 competitors over the last 3 years.

What you're building is a competitor profile:

Agency concentration -- does the competitor get 80% of revenue from one agency? That's a risk to them and an opportunity for you.
Contract size patterns -- are they winning $500K task orders or $50M IDIQs? This tells you where they play.
Growth trajectory -- compare year-over-year award totals. A competitor whose federal revenue is shrinking may be losing past performance relevance.
Teaming patterns -- subcontractor relationships show up in some award records. Know who they partner with.

Step 2: Verify Entity Registrations in SAM.gov

Every entity that does business with the federal government must be registered in SAM.gov. The registration tells you:

Entity status -- Active or Expired. An expired registration means they can't receive new awards.
Small business certifications -- 8(a), HUBZone, SDVOSB, WOSB. These determine which set-aside vehicles they're eligible for.
NAICS codes -- what the entity self-certifies as its primary industries
Exclusion status -- whether the entity has been debarred or suspended

SAM.gov Federal Contracts Search searches entity registrations and contract opportunities. Use it to verify that a competitor's small business certifications are current -- certifications expire, and a competitor that loses 8(a) status suddenly can't compete on 8(a) set-asides.

Step 3: Monitor the Federal Register for Upcoming Requirements

The Federal Register publishes proposed rules, final rules, and notices from every federal agency. For GovCon firms, this is early warning on:

New procurement requirements that will eventually become RFPs
Policy changes that affect existing contracts (cybersecurity requirements, reporting mandates)
Agency budget signals embedded in regulatory impact analyses

Federal Register Search lets you search by keyword, agency, or document type. Set up a weekly pull for your core NAICS codes and agency keywords. A proposed rule published today becomes a procurement requirement in 12-24 months -- that's your capture timeline.

Step 4: Cross-Reference with SEC Filings

If your competitors are publicly traded (or owned by public companies), their SEC filings contain backlog data, revenue concentration disclosures, and forward-looking statements about pipeline.

SEC EDGAR Company Filings Search -- pull 10-K annual reports for public competitors. Search for "backlog" in the filing text. Defense and IT services contractors typically disclose funded vs. unfunded backlog, which tells you how much of their future revenue is already locked in.

The Automated Pipeline

Here's what I'd set up for a GovCon BD team:

Weekly USASpending pull -- all awards in your NAICS codes from the past 7 days. Flag any new awards to tracked competitors.
Monthly SAM.gov check -- verify competitor registrations are active. Flag any certification changes or expirations.
Weekly Federal Register scan -- new proposed rules and notices from your target agencies.
Quarterly SEC review -- 10-K and 10-Q filings from public competitors for backlog and revenue concentration changes.

Each of these runs costs a few dollars and takes minutes. The alternative is two analysts spending two days on it every time a new opportunity surfaces.

The data is already public. The only question is whether you're pulling it systematically or reacting to it after your competitors already have.

How Franchise Buyers Vet Franchisor Companies Using Free Public Data

Ava Torres — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 22:21:21 +0000

I almost bought a franchise once. Smoothie chain, mid-tier brand, $180K all-in. The FDD looked clean. The validation calls went well. Then I pulled the franchisor's state filings and found they'd been administratively dissolved in their home state for six months. Nobody on the "validation list" mentioned it because they didn't know.

That's a $180K lesson I learned for free. Here's how.

The Problem with Franchise Due Diligence

Franchise buyers get a Franchise Disclosure Document. It's legally required, heavily formatted, and written by the franchisor's lawyers. It tells you what they want you to know.

What it doesn't tell you:

Whether the franchisor entity is actually in good standing right now
Whether officers have changed five times in two years
Whether their locations have OSHA violations stacking up
Whether existing franchisees are quietly closing

All of this is public data. You just have to know where to look.

Step 1: Verify the Franchisor Entity in State Records

Every franchisor is registered as a business entity in at least one state. Secretary of State filings tell you:

Formation date -- how long the entity has actually existed (not how long the brand has been around, which is often different)
Status -- Active, Dissolved, Suspended, Forfeited. Anything other than Active is a red flag worth understanding.
Officer/Director changes -- frequent turnover at the top of a franchisor is a signal
Registered agent -- if they're using a commercial agent service, that's normal. If the registered agent is a P.O. box in a strip mall, ask questions.

The franchisor's FDD Item 1 tells you the state of incorporation. Start there, then check every state where they claim to have locations.

I built scrapers for the highest-volume states:

Search by the exact legal name from the FDD. If the entity doesn't come back, or the formation date doesn't match what they told you, that's your first real data point.

Step 2: Check SEC Filings (If Publicly Traded)

Some franchise brands are owned by public companies. If they are, the SEC has a mountain of useful data: annual reports (10-K), quarterly financials (10-Q), and material event disclosures (8-K).

What to look for:

Unit economics disclosures in 10-K filings -- some public franchisors report average unit volumes
8-K filings for executive departures, litigation, or material changes
Earnings call transcripts where analysts ask pointed questions about franchise health

SEC EDGAR Company Filings Search lets you search by company name or ticker and filter by filing type. Pull every 8-K from the last two years and read the "Item" descriptions -- they're short and tell you exactly what happened.

Step 3: Check Facility Safety Records

If the franchise involves physical locations -- restaurants, gyms, childcare, manufacturing -- OSHA inspection records are gold.

A franchisor with multiple locations cited for serious violations tells you something about how they support (or don't support) their franchisees on safety. Repeat violations at the same location type suggest a systemic problem, not a one-off.

OSHA Workplace Inspections Search lets you search by company name and see inspection dates, violation types, and penalty amounts. Search the franchisor's corporate name and any DBA names you find in the FDD.

Step 4: Find Existing Franchisees (Beyond the Validation List)

The FDD gives you a list of current franchisees. But it's the franchisor's list. They know which owners will say nice things.

You want to find franchisees independently. YellowPages listings are surprisingly useful here -- search for the brand name in specific cities and you'll find location addresses and phone numbers the franchisor didn't hand-pick for you.

YellowPages Business Search -- search the franchise brand name in metro areas where they claim to have units. Cross-reference against the FDD's exhibit list. Any locations that show up on YellowPages but aren't in the FDD are worth investigating -- they might be recently closed units that were removed from the disclosure.

Putting It Together

Here's the workflow I'd run before any franchise investment:

Pull the franchisor entity from their home state SOS portal. Confirm status, formation date, officers.
Check SOS filings in every state where they claim 10+ units.
If publicly traded, pull the last 8 quarters of 8-K filings from SEC EDGAR.
Search OSHA for the franchisor name and any major DBA names.
Search YellowPages for the brand in 5-10 metro areas. Compare against the FDD franchisee list.

Total cost: a few dollars in API calls. Total time: under an hour if you automate the searches. Compare that to the $50K-$500K you're about to commit.

The FDD is a starting point. Public records are where you find what the FDD left out.

How Private Equity Fund Admins Verify Portfolio Company Registrations Across States

Ava Torres — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 01:29:23 +0000

Private equity fund administrators are responsible for maintaining accurate records of every portfolio company entity — including state registrations, good standing certificates, and registered agent details. During annual compliance reviews or capital calls, this means checking entity status across every state where a portfolio company operates.

Most fund admins do this manually, logging into each state Secretary of State portal one at a time. For a fund with 15-20 portfolio companies operating in 3-5 states each, that is 60-100 individual portal searches per review cycle.

What Fund Admins Need

Entity status verification: Is the company active, in good standing, or at risk of administrative dissolution?
Registered agent confirmation: Has the agent changed? Is the address current?
Foreign qualification check: Is the company properly registered in every state where it operates?
Officer/director records: Do the records match what the fund has on file?
Annual report deadlines: Which filings are due or overdue?

Automating Multi-State Checks

With Apify actors from pink_comic, fund admins can automate these lookups:

California SOS — search by entity name or number
Texas SOS — includes filing history
Florida SOS — daily filing updates available
New York DOS — entity details and process addresses
Illinois SOS — includes annual report status
New Jersey NJBGS — formation and agent details

Building an Automated Compliance Workflow

Using n8n or Make.com:

Input: spreadsheet of portfolio companies with states of operation
For each company+state pair: call the relevant SOS actor
Compare results against fund records (entity name, agent, status)
Flag discrepancies: dissolved entities, changed agents, missing foreign qualifications
Generate compliance report with action items

This turns a multi-day manual process into an automated report that runs on schedule.

Why This Beats Manual Searches

Scale: Check 100 entity-state combinations in one batch
Consistency: Same data fields extracted every time
Monitoring: Set up scheduled runs to catch status changes between reviews
Audit trail: Every lookup is logged with timestamps

All data sourced from official state government databases. No special access or credentials required.

How M&A Lawyers Build Entity Structure Charts Without Expensive Data Vendors

Ava Torres — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 01:29:03 +0000

M&A attorneys spend hours manually mapping corporate hierarchies — parent companies, subsidiaries, DBAs, and registered agents — across multiple states before every deal. Most rely on expensive data vendors like Dun & Bradstreet or PrivCo for entity trees.

But the same underlying data is publicly available through Secretary of State business registrations. The challenge has always been accessing it programmatically across multiple states.

The Problem

When evaluating a target company, M&A counsel needs to:

Identify every state where the entity is registered (domestic and foreign filings)
Map subsidiaries and related entities by registered agent or officer overlap
Verify entity standing (active, dissolved, suspended) in each jurisdiction
Cross-reference with SEC EDGAR for publicly traded parents
Build a complete org chart before the LOI

Manually searching 5-10 state SOS portals per target — each with different interfaces — is tedious and error-prone.

The Automated Approach

Using Apify actors from pink_comic, you can query multiple state SOS databases plus SEC EDGAR through simple API calls:

Start with the target name — search across California, Texas, New York, Florida, and Illinois SOS databases
Identify the registered agent — shared agents often indicate subsidiary relationships
Reverse search by agent name to find related entities
Cross-reference SEC EDGAR filings via the SEC EDGAR actor for public company connections
Check IRS 990 data via the IRS 990 actor if nonprofit affiliates are involved

Why This Matters for Deal Teams

Speed: Map a multi-state entity structure in minutes instead of days
Cost: Fraction of what Dun & Bradstreet or PrivCo charges
Completeness: Search the actual source databases, not derived/stale vendor data
Auditability: Every data point traces to an official state record

For firms doing regular deal flow, these API calls can be integrated into n8n or Make.com workflows that automatically build entity structure reports from a single company name input.

All data comes from official public government sources. No login credentials or special access required.

How Export Compliance Teams Screen Foreign Business Partners Using Public Data APIs

Ava Torres — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 01:02:37 +0000

Export compliance is one of the few areas of corporate legal work where a mistake doesn't result in a lawsuit — it results in a federal criminal referral. OFAC violations, Export Administration Regulations (EAR) violations, and BIS entity list exposure aren't hypothetical risks. Companies have paid nine-figure penalties for transacting with counterparties they should have caught.

The challenge is scale. A mid-size manufacturer with 200 active international distributors can't do a full manual review on every new partner, every renewal, and every change in beneficial ownership. The teams that are staying ahead of this are building automated pre-screening workflows using public data sources that most compliance teams haven't thought to query.

Here's what a modern export compliance pre-screening stack looks like.

The Gap in Standard Compliance Tools

Most export compliance software — Descartes Denied Party Screening, Visual Compliance, Amber Road — does one thing well: it checks names against sanctions lists. That's table stakes. What these tools don't do is verify that the business entity presenting itself as your distributor actually exists as described, has a coherent corporate history, and isn't a shell layered in front of a restricted end user.

The pre-screening gap is entity verification and corporate structure transparency, not list matching. List matching tools are commoditized. Entity verification at scale is where most teams are still doing manual work.

Step 1: Verify Entity Registration in Home Jurisdiction

Before anything else, verify that the foreign business partner has a real corporate registration in the jurisdiction they claim. For US-registered entities (foreign companies with US subsidiaries are common), the US Business Entity Search actor pulls Secretary of State records across all major states — California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois — and returns entity status, formation date, and officer information.

For counterparties claiming US operations, entity age and registered agent information are useful red flags. An entity formed six weeks before a large export contract was executed warrants additional diligence regardless of what the sanctions list check returns.

Step 2: Pull SEC Filings for Any Publicly Reporting Entity

If your foreign business partner has a US-listed parent, affiliate, or investor, SEC EDGAR contains years of financial disclosure and beneficial ownership reporting. The SEC EDGAR Company Filings actor gives you programmatic access to 10-K, 10-Q, 20-F (foreign private issuers), and beneficial ownership filings (SC 13D/G) for any reporting entity.

For compliance teams, the 20-F filings from foreign private issuers are particularly valuable. They include business description, risk factors, and related-party transaction disclosure that can surface ownership structures and business relationships that don't appear in any sanctions database.

Step 3: Check US Business Presence and Operating History

For counterparties claiming established US distribution or sales operations, cross-referencing their public business listings is a lightweight corroboration step. The YellowPages Scraper searches by business name and returns address history, phone records, and category data across US markets.

A foreign distributor claiming a 10-year US sales presence with no public business listings, no directory presence, and a domain registered recently is a profile that warrants a harder look — not because it's necessarily a violation, but because the representation doesn't match the public record.

Step 4: Domain Age and Registration History

Domain registration history is a cheap signal that most compliance workflows skip entirely. The WHOIS Domain Lookup actor returns registration date, registrar, name server history, and prior ownership data for any domain.

For export compliance, domain age corroborates the claimed history of the business. It's not dispositive, but a counterparty with a 90-day-old domain claiming to be a 15-year-old regional distributor has a factual inconsistency that should be documented and resolved before a license determination is made.

Building the Pre-Screening Workflow

Export compliance teams are automating this as a parallel workflow to their existing sanctions screening. When a new counterparty is entered into the ERP or compliance system, an Apify-scheduled job runs entity lookups, SEC searches, and WHOIS checks simultaneously and returns structured output to the compliance analyst within minutes.

The analyst reviews flags — entity too new, domain inconsistency, no US operating presence despite claims — and decides whether to escalate to enhanced due diligence or proceed. This is not replacing legal review. It's front-loading the data gathering so that legal time is spent on real issues, not on pulling records manually.

Total data cost per counterparty: under $3 in Apify credits. Total analyst time saved per review: 30–90 minutes. For a team running 50+ new counterparty reviews per quarter, that's a material efficiency gain — and a documented, reproducible audit trail that regulators expect to see.

Getting Started

Start with the US Business Entity Search actor for any counterparties with claimed US registrations, and the SEC EDGAR Company Filings actor for publicly reporting affiliates. Both actors run on Apify's cloud with no infrastructure setup required and output structured JSON that integrates directly with compliance workflow tools.

How Commercial Real Estate Brokers Automate Tenant Credit Checks with Public Business Data

Ava Torres — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 01:02:23 +0000

Commercial real estate brokers spend hours vetting prospective tenants before a lease is signed. Credit bureaus give you a score. They don't tell you whether the LLC on the lease application was incorporated three weeks ago, whether the principals are tied to shell companies in three other states, or whether the business has ever actually operated at the address listed on the application.

That gap is where deals go sideways. A tenant that looks creditworthy in February is in default by August, and the landlord is left with a vacant space and legal fees.

The brokers winning on tenant quality are pulling public records before they ever schedule a site tour. Here's the workflow they're building.

The Problem with Standard Tenant Screening

Most CRE brokers rely on one of two things: a Dun & Bradstreet report ($50–$300 per pull) or a personal credit check that tells them nothing about the operating entity. Neither is fast, neither is cheap at scale, and neither surfaces the full picture.

For a broker managing 20–40 lease transactions per year, that's a meaningful cost. More importantly, it's a process that produces a single data point — a score — when what you actually need is a mosaic: entity age, registered agent, officer history, related entities, and operational signals.

Step 1: Verify the Entity Is Real and Active

The first check is Secretary of State registration. Is the LLC or corporation actually registered? Is it in good standing? When was it formed?

For multi-state tenants, this means checking multiple SOS portals — California, Texas, New York, Florida, and Illinois cover the majority of commercial tenants. The US Business Entity Search actor runs searches across state SOS databases and returns entity status, formation date, registered agent, and officer information in a structured format you can pipe into a spreadsheet or CRM.

For California specifically, the California Business Leads actor provides deeper detail on entities registered with the CA Secretary of State, including entity type and status flags.

Entity age matters. A two-year-old LLC with a track record is a different risk profile than one formed last month with the same principals.

Step 2: Cross-Reference SEC Filings for Larger Tenants

If your prospective tenant is a subsidiary of a publicly traded company or a private company with institutional investors, SEC EDGAR is a free source of financial disclosure. The SEC EDGAR Company Filings actor pulls 10-K, 10-Q, and 8-K filings for any reporting entity. For a retail or office tenant that's a subsidiary of a larger enterprise, this is often faster than requesting audited financials and reveals information the tenant may not volunteer.

Step 3: Check Operating Presence via YellowPages

A business that has no public presence — no listings, no reviews, no web footprint — may not be operating at the scale they represent. YellowPages business listings aren't perfect, but they're a useful signal. The YellowPages Scraper lets you search by business name and geography and returns address history, phone numbers, and category data that can surface inconsistencies between what a tenant claims and what the public record shows.

If a tenant says they operate three locations in the metro area and none of them show up in any public directory, that's worth a follow-up question.

Step 4: WHOIS for Domain-Anchored Businesses

For any tenant with a significant online presence, domain registration age is a useful corroborating signal. A business claiming five years of operation with a domain registered 18 months ago has some explaining to do. The WHOIS Domain Lookup actor returns registration date, registrar, and ownership history for any domain.

Building the Workflow

In practice, brokers are building simple Apify-scheduled workflows that run these checks in parallel on any new tenant application. The output feeds into a shared Airtable or Google Sheet that the leasing team reviews before moving to LOI stage.

Total data cost per tenant: under $2 in Apify credits. Total time: under 10 minutes of human review. The alternative is paying $150 for a D&B report that doesn't tell you the entity was registered 60 days ago.

For brokers managing institutional landlord relationships, this kind of systematic pre-screening is increasingly a competitive differentiator — it's the kind of rigor that justifies the commission and builds long-term client trust.

Getting Started

All four actors run on Apify's cloud infrastructure with no setup beyond an Apify account. Start with the US Business Entity Search actor for entity verification, then layer in SEC EDGAR and WHOIS for tenants that warrant deeper review. Most brokers find they can build a useful baseline workflow in an afternoon.

How Procurement Teams Verify Vendor Business Registrations Before Awarding Contracts

Ava Torres — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:29:15 +0000

Before awarding a contract, procurement teams need to verify that vendors are legitimate, active businesses in good standing. A vendor that's dissolved, suspended, or registered under a different name than what's on the bid is a compliance and legal risk.

Most procurement departments still do this manually -- visiting each state's Secretary of State website, searching one entity at a time. When you're evaluating 20+ vendors per RFP, that's hours of repetitive work.

What Procurement Teams Need to Verify

Entity status -- Is the business active, dissolved, suspended, or revoked?
State of incorporation -- Does the vendor's claimed home state match reality?
Formation date -- How long has this business actually existed?
Registered agent -- Is there a valid registered agent, or has it lapsed?
Officer names -- Do the people signing the contract match the corporate officers?
Foreign qualifications -- Is the vendor authorized to do business in your state?

Automating Vendor Verification

Instead of visiting state portals one by one, Secretary of State search APIs let procurement teams batch-verify vendor registrations:

Run a vendor's legal name through Texas SOS, Florida SOS, New York DOS, or Illinois SOS
Get back entity status, formation date, officers, and registered agent in structured JSON
Flag vendors whose status is anything other than "Active" or "In Good Standing"
Cross-reference officer names against bid documents

Government Contractor Verification

For federal procurement, combine SOS data with USASpending Contract Search to see a vendor's federal contracting history -- past awards, performance, and DUNS/UEI numbers.

Building a Vendor Compliance Workflow

A practical workflow:

Export vendor list from your procurement system
Search each vendor name across relevant state SOS portals
Flag mismatches: wrong state, dissolved status, name discrepancies
Pull federal contracting history for vendors claiming government experience
Generate a compliance summary for the evaluation committee

This turns a multi-day manual process into something that runs in minutes.

Why This Matters

Reduce contract risk -- catch dissolved or suspended vendors before award
Speed up evaluation cycles -- verify 50 vendors in the time it takes to check 5 manually
Audit trail -- structured data creates a defensible record of due diligence
Compliance -- meet state and federal vendor verification requirements without extra headcount

All data sourced from official Secretary of State portals and USASpending.gov -- public records available to anyone.

How Environmental Consultants Trace Contaminated Site Ownership Across States

Ava Torres — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:28:55 +0000

Environmental consultants performing Phase I and Phase II ESAs need to trace property ownership chains to identify potentially responsible parties (PRPs) under CERCLA. When contaminated sites change hands across state lines, piecing together the ownership history manually is brutal.

The challenge: a former manufacturing site in Texas was sold to an LLC registered in Delaware, which is owned by a holding company incorporated in Florida. Who's liable for the cleanup?

The Manual Process Is Broken

Consultants typically:

Search the state Secretary of State where the property sits
Find the registered agent or managing member
Search that entity in its state of incorporation
Repeat until you find actual humans or a dead end
Cross-reference with SEC filings for public companies

This can take days per site, and environmental consulting firms often have dozens of sites in their pipeline.

Automating PRP Identification

Using Secretary of State business search APIs, you can:

Search entity names across multiple states simultaneously instead of visiting each portal
Pull officer and registered agent data to map ownership chains
Cross-reference with SEC EDGAR filings for public parent companies
Track entity status (active, dissolved, merged) to identify when liability shifted

For Texas entities, the TX SOS Business Search returns officers, registered agents, and formation dates -- exactly what you need for ownership chain analysis.

For multi-state traces, combine results from Florida SOS, New York DOS, and California SOS to follow entities across jurisdictions.

The SEC Connection

When the ownership chain leads to a publicly traded company, SEC EDGAR Company Search reveals:

Parent-subsidiary relationships in 10-K filings
Material environmental liabilities disclosed in annual reports
Historical acquisitions that may have inherited contamination liability

Why This Matters for Consultants

Faster PRP identification means:

Quicker Phase I turnaround -- clients get reports sooner
Better liability allocation in Phase II -- knowing who owned what and when
Stronger cost recovery claims under CERCLA Section 107
Competitive advantage in proposals -- demonstrate faster turnaround capabilities

The firms that can trace ownership chains in hours instead of days win more work and deliver better results for their clients.

All data comes from official state Secretary of State portals and SEC EDGAR -- public records that anyone can access.