Companies House Data Aggregation for a UK Legal Tech Startup

Industry

Legal Tech / Compliance / KYC

Geography

United Kingdom — England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland

Data Coverage

Company filings, director appointments, PSC data, accounts, charges, dissolutions

Actowiz Solutions delivered Companies House data aggregation for a Cambridge-based legal tech startup — providing real-time intelligence on 5.1M+ UK companies across filings, director changes, beneficial ownership, and corporate events.

Client Overview

The client is a Cambridge-based legal tech startup serving UK law firms, compliance teams, and KYC providers with an AI-powered corporate intelligence platform. Their value proposition rested on near real-time access to Companies House data, enriched with AI-driven entity resolution and risk signals.

Companies House provides bulk data APIs, but real-time event-driven intelligence (new director appointments, charge filings, PSC changes) requires sophisticated scraping and event-detection logic on top of those APIs.

Business Challenges

Real-Time Event Detection

Companies House publishes 80,000+ filings daily; detecting the events that mattered to specific clients within minutes was essential.

Director Network Resolution

Same individual often appeared as director across dozens of companies under slightly different name variants — requiring entity resolution.

Beneficial Ownership Chains

PSC (People with Significant Control) data needed multi-hop chain resolution to surface true beneficial owners through corporate structures.

Strike-Off & Insolvency Signals

Companies facing strike-off or insolvency triggered urgent client alerts — but filings used non-standardised terminology.

Project Objectives

The client partnered with Actowiz Solutions to:

• Index 5.1M+ active UK companies with near real-time event detection
• Resolve director identities across name variants using entity resolution
• Map beneficial ownership chains through corporate structures
• Detect strike-off, insolvency, and dissolution events within 1 hour
• Deliver clean structured data via REST API and webhook events

Actowiz Solutions Approach

Hybrid Bulk API + Live Crawl

Combined Companies House bulk data API for baseline ingestion with real-time crawl of filing feeds for sub-hour event detection.

Director Entity Resolution

Built a deterministic + fuzzy entity-resolution engine matching directors across companies via name, DOB month, and address — 96% precision.

PSC Chain Resolution

Recursive ownership-chain resolver traversing parent-subsidiary structures up to 8 levels deep to surface ultimate beneficial owners.

Event Classification Engine

ML classifier auto-tagged filings: director appointment, charge filed, accounts overdue, strike-off proposed, dissolution complete.

Webhook & REST Delivery

Client received per-company webhook events plus on-demand REST API queries — feeding into their AI platform and compliance workflows.

Key Features

• 5.1M+ active UK companies indexed
• Sub-hour event detection across all filings
• Director entity resolution at 96% precision
• 8-level deep PSC chain resolution
• ML-based event classification
• Per-company webhook delivery

Business Impact

Within 18 months:

• 5.1M+ UK companies indexed with continuous refresh
• 240,000+ event webhooks delivered to the client's platform daily
• £11M ARR generated on top of the Actowiz-powered data layer
• 31% faster KYC turnaround for the client's law firm customers
• Eliminated dependency on 3 commercial corporate data providers

Testimonial

"Companies House is the foundation of UK corporate intelligence — and Actowiz built the operating system on top of it."

— Founder & CTO, Cambridge Legal Tech Startup

Conclusion

UK corporate transparency is the envy of global jurisdictions — but raw Companies House data is just the starting point. Actowiz Solutions delivered the entity resolution, event detection, and beneficial ownership layers that turned 5.1M company records into a real-time intelligence engine powering an £11M ARR legal tech business.