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Rowcraft

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Look up Brazilian companies by CNPJ, or find them by state, city and CNAE code

#webscraping #brazil #data #api

Brazil has one of the richest public company registers, but getting it into a spreadsheet is awkward: the Receita Federal publishes monthly dumps of several gigabytes, and web lookups work one CNPJ at a time.

I built an Apify tool on top of the free community service minhareceita.org (with OpenCNPJ as a fallback for lookups). Disclosure: I made it and it is paid, 1 USD per 1,000 companies on the free plan, and the free monthly credit covers your first runs.

Two modes:

  1. Lookup: paste CNPJ numbers (with or without dots) and get the register data back. A number with wrong check digits is reported without a request, and numbers that do not exist are not charged.
  2. Search: states (UF), 7-digit CNAE activity codes, IBGE city codes, legal nature codes, opening date, active companies only, head offices only.

Example: listed software companies in São Paulo.

{
  "states": ["SP"],
  "activityCodes": ["6201501", "6202300", "6209100", "6311900"],
  "legalNatureCodes": ["2054", "2046"],
  "maxItems": 100
}
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Each row: CNPJ, legal name, trade name, status and reason, main and secondary CNAE, legal nature, capital, size, address of the establishment, opening date. Real rows are on the example page, no account needed.

Privacy by design: no partners, no e-mail, no phone. Sole traders (MEI, "Empresário Individual") and other legal forms named after a person are skipped and never charged, because their register entry can carry the person's tax number.

Tip: name a legal nature such as 2054 (closed corporation) or 2046 (open corporation) in a search. Without it the tool also reads many sole-trader records only to skip them, which is slower.

Example page: https://apify.com/rowcraft/brazil-cnpj-companies-scraper/examples/listed-software-companies-sao-paulo-cnpj
Tool page: https://apify.com/rowcraft/brazil-cnpj-companies-scraper

Feedback and missing filters: the Issues tab of the tool, I answer within a day.

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