Telling a company from a person sounds trivial, until you have to do it reliably across millions of real-world names that arrive in every format imaginable.
This release is the result of that work: NameAPI now recognizes businesses with far greater accuracy, and can also match business names against each other.
1. Detecting business names
Not every entry in a name field belongs to a person. “Siemens AG”, “Volkswagen AG”, “adidas AG” are companies, and recognizing them as such means better results.
What’s new
No legal form required. A company is recognized even without a GmbH or AG attached, because of a known business name, a German activity word (Bäckerei, Metzgerei, Apotheke, Gasthof, Werkstatt, Kanzlei, Brauerei), or a country name in the text. “Gasthof zur Post” is a business; the suffix is no longer mandatory.
German companies:
- “Siemens AG” -> Siemens BUSINESS NAME -> AG LEGAL FORM -> person type: LEGAL
- “Volkswagen AG” -> Volkswagen BUSINESS NAME -> AG LEGAL FORM
- “adidas AG” -> adidas BUSINESS NAME -> AG LEGAL FORM
Recognized with no legal form:
- “Volkswagen” -> Volkswagen BUSINESS NAME -> person type: LEGAL
- “Verizon” -> Verizon BUSINESS NAME -> person type: LEGAL
- “Mastercard” -> Mastercard BUSINESS NAME -> person type: LEGAL
- “Lufthansa” -> Lufthansa BUSINESS NAME -> person type: LEGAL
- “Nvidia” -> Nvidia BUSINESS NAME -> person type: LEGAL
Status markers, activity words, and people:
- “Siemens AG i.Gr.” -> Siemens BUSINESS NAME -> AG LEGAL FORM -> i.Gr. STATUS INDICATOR
- “Metzgerei Wagner” -> Metzgerei Wagner BUSINESS NAME (triggered by “Metzgerei”) -> person type: LEGAL
- “Scholz” -> recognized as a personal surname, not a business -> person type: NATURAL
2. Matching business names
The matcher can now compare two business names and decide whether they refer to the same company, not just identical strings, but real-world variants. It matches a short, everyday name against the fuller legal name, ignores extra words or a legal form on one side only, and tolerates typos so a small misspelling no longer breaks the link.
- “Volkswagen” vs “Volkswagen AG” -> MATCHING
- “Lufthansa” vs “Deutsche Lufthansa AG” -> MATCHING
- “Siemens” vs “Siemens AG” -> MATCHING
Which countries we have company data for
Beyond legal-form and activity-word detection, NameAPI looks names up against per-country company datasets. Coverage currently spans 16 countries:
Australia, Czechia, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Latvia, Moldova, Norway, Romania, Slovakia, Sweden, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and United States — plus a dedicated cross-border European bank dataset. More legal forms and company data are on the way.
Try it yourself
Send a company name through the Name Parser live demo on optimaize.com and look for the BUSINESS NAME, LEGAL FORM, and STATUS INDICATOR term types in the response. Then drop two variants of the same company, for example “Mastercard” and “Mastercard Inc.”, into the Name Matcher demo to see them resolve to a match.