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If you’ve priced Crunchbase or PitchBook lately, you know company and funding data is mostly locked behind expensive seats. But a surprising amount of it is public and free — you just have to pull it from the primary sources instead of a reseller. This guide assembles a company profile (legal identity + real funding rounds + financials) from the SEC and the global LEI system, with no API key and no scraping of gated sites.
1. Funding rounds → SEC Form D
When a private US company raises a round under Regulation D, it files a Form D with the SEC. It’s a public filing and it contains the parts you actually want: total offering amount, amount sold, industry, and date.
# find Form D filings for an issuer
curl -s 'https://efts.sec.gov/LATEST/search-index?q=%22Databricks%22&forms=D' -H 'User-Agent: yourname you@example.com'The XML carries totalOfferingAmount, totalAmountSold, and industryGroupType. A recent Databricks Form D discloses an offering north of $1B — real funding data, filed by the company, free to read.
Two honest caveats most scrapers get wrong: match the issuer name strictly (“Stripe Milton LLC” is not Stripe; exclude SPV/fund vehicles), and remember coverage is partial — many startups raise through structures that never file Form D under their own name. Always send a declared User-Agent (the SEC’s fair-access requirement).
2. Legal identity → GLEIF (the LEI system)
The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation publishes legal-entity data as fully open data — legal name, HQ country, registered address, status.
curl -s 'https://api.gleif.org/api/v1/fuzzycompletions?field=entity.legalName&q=Anthropic'Caveat: common brand names collide across countries, so confirm the jurisdiction — ideally cross-check against a US SEC filing.
3. Industry + financials → SEC EDGAR
For any SEC-registered company, the submissions API gives SIC industry, state of incorporation, address, and tickers. Public companies also expose real reported numbers via XBRL company-facts (Apple’s latest annual revenue comes back as ~$416B).
curl -s 'https://data.sec.gov/submissions/CIK0000320193.json' -H 'User-Agent: yourname you@example.com'Putting it together
Stitch those three and you have a legitimate, official-source company profile — identity, funding events, and financials — without paying for Crunchbase and without scraping anything gated. The hard part is the glue: entity resolution, strict issuer matching, XML parsing, and rate-limit-friendly EDGAR access.
If you’d rather skip the plumbing, the Company Data Aggregator does exactly this in one call — give it a company name or domain and get GLEIF legal identity, SEC Form D funding events, EDGAR industry/financials, and a domain/tech profile. No API key.
Useful neighbors: SEC Form 8-K Material Events Scraper, 13F Holdings Delta Tracker, Business Registration Lookup.
Informational, official-source data — not investment advice. Declare your User-Agent and respect the SEC’s rate limits.
See also: New — Crunchbase News Scraper
Factual public data — not financial or investment advice.
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