Corporate Hierarchy API

What is Corporate Hierarchy API?

Corporate Hierarchy API is an open-source tool designed to map corporate ownership structures by tracing relationships from individual companies upward to their ultimate parent entities. The API conducts research across public web sources and global government registries to build comprehensive ownership chains. The tool addresses a specific operational need: organizations conducting due diligence, supply chain risk assessment, or sanctions compliance checks must often manually investigate corporate relationships—a process that can be time-consuming and error-prone. Corporate Hierarchy API automates this research by aggregating publicly available ownership data. The primary users are compliance teams, legal departments, and business intelligence professionals who need to understand beneficial ownership and corporate structures for risk management purposes. Financial institutions, government contractors, and companies operating in regulated industries represent typical use cases. Key characteristics include its focus on tracing ownership to ultimate parent companies rather than stopping at intermediate holding entities, reliance on verifiable public sources, and availability as open-source software. This combination allows organizations to conduct ownership verification without vendor lock-in while maintaining transparency about data sources. The API is currently in beta, indicating ongoing development and potential changes to functionality or data coverage.