A company enrichment API takes an identifier for an organisation, usually a domain, and returns a structured record describing it: industry, headcount band, location, revenue estimate, technologies detected and corporate hierarchy. One input, one company object out. It is the account-level half of enrichment, and it answers a different question from person-level lookup.
Which enrichment page you actually want
Four pages on this site cover enrichment APIs and they are not interchangeable. Use this table to land on the right one.
| If you want to | Go to | It returns |
|---|---|---|
| You want to enrich a company record from a domain | This page | Firmographics, size, industry, location |
| You want to enrich a person record from a name or email | People enrichment API | Title, seniority, verified work email, direct dial |
| You want to compare vendors as a buyer | Contact enrichment API | Coverage, pricing, accuracy across tools |
| You want to compare integrations as an engineer | Data enrichment API | Auth, rate limits, latency, schema stability |
What a company enrichment call returns
Field coverage varies by vendor, but the useful fields cluster into four groups. The difference between providers is rarely whether a field exists and almost always how often it is populated and how recently it was checked.
| Group | Typical fields | How reliable |
|---|---|---|
| Identity | Legal name, trading name, domain, logo, description | High. Rarely wrong, rarely useful on its own |
| Firmographics | Industry code, employee count, revenue band, founded year | Employee bands are broadly reliable, revenue estimates much less so |
| Location | HQ address, country, additional offices | High for HQ, patchy for subsidiaries |
| Technographics | Detected tools and infrastructure | 70 to 85 percent, and far weaker for back-office systems |
| Hierarchy | Parent, subsidiaries, acquisitions | The weakest field group across every vendor. Verify before relying on it |
The fields that quietly break workflows
Three of these deserve specific warnings, because they are the ones that pass a demo and fail in production.
- Employee count is usually a band rather than a number, and different vendors band differently. If you route leads on a 200-employee threshold and your provider reports “201 to 500”, every company between 150 and 200 is invisible to your rule.
- Revenue estimates are modelled, not observed, for any company that does not file publicly. Treat them as an ordering signal, never as a qualification threshold.
- Industry classification differs between taxonomies. A company one vendor calls “Computer Software” another calls “Information Technology and Services”, and a filter written against one label silently returns nothing against the other.
How to evaluate a company enrichment API
Run the same eight checks against every candidate, using your own accounts rather than the vendor’s sample file. A provider tuned for US enterprise will look excellent on a demo list and thin out badly on European mid-market.
- Match rate on your domains. Send 500 real accounts and measure how many return a populated record, not how many return a 200 response.
- Field fill rate, measured per field. Headline match rates hide the fact that the two fields you care about are empty two thirds of the time.
- Freshness. Ask when each field was last verified. A provider that cannot answer per field is quoting a crawl date.
- Latency at p95, not the average. Averages hide the timeouts that break a synchronous form.
- Rate limits and burst behaviour. What happens on the 101st call in a second decides whether you need a queue.
- Billing unit. Charged per call or per successful match. This is the single biggest driver of real cost and the easiest thing to miss in a contract.
- Schema stability. Ask how often fields have been renamed or removed in the past year. Silent schema drift is the most common cause of a working integration going quiet.
- Bulk endpoint. If you will ever backfill a database, a per-record loop is not a viable path and you need to know the batch ceiling now.
Cost, and the unit that actually matters
Pricing is quoted per lookup, but the number that decides your bill is the billing unit combined with your match rate. At a 60 percent match rate, a provider charging per call is 40 percent more expensive per usable record than the sticker price suggests, and a provider charging per match at a higher sticker price is often cheaper in practice.
Model it on your real volume before signing. Take your monthly lookup count, multiply by the measured match rate from your own test, and compare cost per populated record rather than cost per call.
Common use cases, in order of how well they work
| Use case | What it needs | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Inbound form shortening | Domain to firmographics, synchronous, low latency | Works well. The clearest ROI |
| Lead routing and scoring | Reliable size and industry fields | Works, if you handle banding carefully |
| CRM record backfill | Bulk endpoint, per-match billing | Works, and is where most of the volume goes |
| Territory assignment | Accurate HQ location | Works for HQ, fails on multinationals |
| Total addressable market sizing | Complete coverage of a market | Poor. Coverage gaps look like market gaps |
| Account hierarchy mapping | Parent and subsidiary links | Poor across every vendor. Verify manually |
Where Scalelist fits
Scalelist is an AI lead finder rather than a firmographics vendor. The overlap with company enrichment is at the point where an account becomes contactable: you describe the companies you want in plain English, including size, industry and location, and Scalelist returns the people inside them with verified work emails and direct dials attached. If your goal is a populated company record for CRM hygiene, a dedicated firmographics provider is the right tool. If your goal is to go from a company profile to the three people you need to call, that is the job Scalelist does. See company enrichment for the concept and the B2B data API for the developer surface.
Related pages
- People enrichment API: person records rather than company records
- Contact enrichment API: vendor comparison for buyers
- Data enrichment API: integration comparison for engineers
- Firmographic data explained
- Technographic data explained
- Business information API
Frequently asked questions
What is a company enrichment API?
An API that takes a company identifier, usually a domain, and returns a structured record with firmographics, location, technographics and hierarchy. It enriches the account, not the person.
What is the difference between a company enrichment API and a people enrichment API?
The entity. A company enrichment API takes a domain and returns an organisation record. A people enrichment API takes a person identifier and returns a person record with title, seniority and contact details.
How accurate is company enrichment data?
Identity and HQ location are highly reliable. Employee bands are broadly reliable. Revenue estimates are modelled rather than observed, and corporate hierarchy is the weakest field group across every vendor.
How much does a company enrichment API cost?
Pricing is quoted per lookup, but the real driver is whether you are billed per call or per successful match, combined with your match rate. Compare cost per populated record on your own domains rather than the advertised rate.
