UK companies

UK company search

Companies House publishes more about UK limited companies than almost any registry in the world. The trouble is that finding what you actually need (a director's other appointments, a beneficial owner, the share split inside the latest CS01, a charge against a company) takes you across five different parts of the same service. OpenRegistry pulls every one of those into a single live endpoint. Free anonymous tier. No API key.

Searches the live Companies House register. Try Monzo Bank (09446231), Iceland Foods (01107406), Greggs (00502851), or any UK limited.

Connect Claude Desktop Compare with OpenCorporates Developer reference

What you get

The same data Companies House publishes, returned live on every call, with the upstream field names preserved. No daily crawl, no aggregator schema in the middle.

Profile. Legal name, registration number, registered office, incorporation date, status (active, dormant, liquidation, struck off), SIC codes, accounts schedule, confirmation-statement schedule.
Officers. Current and resigned directors, secretaries, with appointment and resignation dates. Search a person by name to get every other UK company they sit on. See UK director search.
Beneficial ownership. Persons with Significant Control (PSC) register, introduced by the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act 2015 and tightened by the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act 2022. See UK PSC search.
Filings. Every statutory filing the company has ever submitted, with the raw iXBRL or PDF bytes returned inline. CS01 confirmation statements, IN01 incorporations, full accounts, micro-entity accounts, AA01 changes of accounting reference date, and the rest. See UK filings search.
Charges. Registered fixed and floating charges, persons entitled, status, creation and satisfaction dates. The MR01 / MR02 / MR03 / MR04 series.
Documents. The actual filing bytes, downloadable through fetch_document. Most are free at Companies House; OpenRegistry forwards them as-is.

By search intent

Search by director

Find every UK company a person is or has been a director of. Cross-company appointment tracing for KYB, AML, and journalism.

Beneficial owners (PSC)

Statutory PSC register lookup. Walk corporate PSCs upstream until the chain reaches individuals.

Filings & accounts

Download CS01s, full accounts, micro-entity accounts, charge filings as raw iXBRL or PDF. No paywall.

How a typical workflow looks

An AI agent connected to the OpenRegistry MCP endpoint walks a complete KYB dossier on Monzo Bank Limited in five tool calls.

// 1. Resolve the company
search_companies({ jurisdiction: "GB", query: "monzo bank" })
// → 09446231 — Monzo Bank Limited — active — incorporated 2015-02-06

// 2. Profile
get_company_profile({ jurisdiction: "GB", company_id: "09446231" })

// 3. Officers
get_officers({ jurisdiction: "GB", company_id: "09446231" })

// 4. Persons with Significant Control
get_persons_with_significant_control({ jurisdiction: "GB", company_id: "09446231" })

// 5. Recent filings + registered charges
list_filings({ jurisdiction: "GB", company_id: "09446231", limit: 25 })
get_charges({ jurisdiction: "GB", company_id: "09446231" })

Full walkthrough at /docs/case-studies/kyc-dossier-five-calls.

Connecting

The fastest path is to point a Model Context Protocol client at https://openregistry.sophymarine.com/mcp. Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline, Goose, and Zed all speak MCP natively.

// claude_desktop_config.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "openregistry": {
      "url": "https://openregistry.sophymarine.com/mcp",
      "transport": "http"
    }
  }
}

A REST surface is also live at https://openregistry.sophymarine.com/api/v1/search and the per-tool endpoints; see the UK developer reference for the full schema.

Where the data comes from. Companies House publishes a free public-data API and a free document-download surface. Both have their own rate limits, idiosyncrasies, and authentication models. OpenRegistry fronts both, adds an MCP transport, and unifies the response shape across the other 26 jurisdictions we wire. The underlying record is still CH's. We do not change it.

Pricing

The free anonymous tier is 20 requests per minute per IP, no signup. Signed-in free is 30 per minute per user. Pro at $9 a month is 180 per minute. Max at $29 a month is 900 per minute and adds the cross-border fan-out cap to 30 jurisdictions per call. All tiers see the full UK data set; the difference is throughput, not coverage. Full pricing on the upgrade page.