How to Verify a Private Company Before You Invest: A Public Records Checklist

A pitch deck, a website and a founder's LinkedIn profile have one thing in common: the company wrote them. They tell you what the company wants you to believe. Before you invest in a private company, or rely on its claims in a dispute, you want to know what independent records say.

Private companies publish far less than listed ones, but they still leave a trail. Registers record that they exist and who runs them. Securities filings record many of their raises. Courts, regulators, patent offices and government spending databases record what happened to them. This checklist walks through those records in the order an experienced analyst would check them, what each one can and can't tell you, and the red flags worth a follow-up question.

Before you start: how to record what you find

Three habits make a check worth relying on later.

• Write down the source, not just the answer. For every finding, note the record, the link and the date you looked. A finding without a source is an opinion.
• Treat the company's own statements as claims, never as proof. A press release, a case study on the company's site or an archived copy of its homepage is still the company talking. It can tell you what was claimed and when, but it can't confirm the claim.
• Separate "contradicted" from "not found". A record that says something different from the deck is a finding. A record you couldn't find is a gap. Registers differ by country, many filings are optional, and searches miss name variants, so a gap is a question to ask, not a verdict.

1. Confirm the legal entity exists

Start with the company register in the place the company says it is incorporated. The brand name on the deck is often not the legal name, so find the legal entity first; everything else hangs off it.

Where to look

• United States: the Secretary of State business registry for the state of incorporation. Many startups incorporate in Delaware, whose Division of Corporations offers a free entity search that returns the entity name, file number, incorporation date and registered agent. Detailed status information is not part of the free search.
• United Kingdom: Companies House, which is free and unusually detailed: officers, filing history, annual accounts and people with significant control.
• Anywhere: the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) database. An LEI is a 20-character code that companies obtain to take part in financial transactions; the record shows the legal name, registered address, and often the parent company.

What to check

• The exact legal name and registration number, and whether they match the contracts and term sheet you are being asked to sign.
• The incorporation date against the story. "Ten years of experience" can be true of the founders while the entity is eight months old; know which one you are buying into.
• Status: active, dissolved, or in the process of being struck off. In the UK, overdue accounts and confirmation statements are visible on the filing history.
• The registered address. A registered agent's address is normal; an address that doesn't match anything else the company says is worth a question.

Red flags: no entity under any plausible name; an entity in a different country from the one claimed; a dissolved company still trading under its brand; a long history of late filings.

2. Match the people to the records

Registers list the people who formally run a company. Compare them with the team page and the deck.

• Officers and directors. Are the founders on the register? If the deck lists a CEO who is not an officer, that may be fine, but it is worth understanding.
• Other appointments. Companies House lets you open an officer's record and see their other current and past appointments. Previous companies that were dissolved after a short life, or a pattern of appointments that overlap with the claimed career, are worth reading.
• Owners. UK companies must report people with significant control. A controlling owner you have not been told about changes the picture.

Be careful with namesakes. Two people with the same name are common, and a record about the wrong person is worse than no record. Only attach a record to a founder when something ties it to them: the same company, a matching month and year of birth on the register, or the same address history.

Checks on the people themselves, such as sanctions screening, insolvency or criminal records, are a different matter from searching company registers. They are regulated in many countries, and the safe way to run them is with the founder's consent. Evifound's Know Your Founder product is built around that consent.

3. Test the funding claims

"We raised $4M from top-tier investors" is one of the most common claims in a deck and one of the easier ones to test in the United States.

• SEC Form D. Companies that raise money under Regulation D file a Form D notice with the SEC, generally within 15 calendar days after the first sale. It is free to search on EDGAR. The notice states the total offering amount, how much has been sold, the date of first sale, and the related persons: the executive officers, directors and promoters. Compare all four with the deck.
• EDGAR full-text search. Search for the company's name across filings from 2001 onward. Mentions in other companies' filings, such as an acquirer describing a deal or a public customer naming a supplier, are independent evidence that is easy to miss.
• Investors' own announcements. A lead investor's portfolio page or press release is a second source. The startup's own announcement is not.

What a gap means: not every raise relies on Regulation D, some issuers file late or under a different name, and raises outside the US leave different trails. A missing Form D is a question to ask, not proof that the round didn't happen. A Form D that shows a much smaller amount sold than the deck claims is a finding.

4. Check revenue and customer claims

Revenue is the hardest claim to verify for a private company, which is why it deserves the most care.

• Accounts. US private companies don't publish financial statements. UK companies file annual accounts at Companies House, but small companies can file shortened accounts that leave out the profit and loss account, so you may see the balance sheet without revenue. Where accounts exist, compare cash, debts and the size of the balance sheet with the story.
• Government contracts. USAspending.gov lists federal contract and grant awards by recipient. If the company says it works with US agencies, the awards should be there under its legal name or a parent.
• Named customers. A logo on a slide is the company's claim. Look for the customer's own words: a case study on the customer's site, a press release from the customer, or a mention in the customer's filings.
• Deck arithmetic. Before you go looking for records, check that the deck agrees with itself. Annual recurring revenue should be roughly monthly recurring revenue times twelve; customers times average contract value should be near revenue; cash divided by monthly burn should match the stated runway; pre-money valuation plus the round should equal post-money. Numbers that don't add up are the cheapest red flag to find.

5. Verify intellectual property

"Patented technology" can mean a granted patent, a pending application, an expired patent or a patent owned by someone else.

• Patents. Search the USPTO's Patent Public Search, the European Patent Office's Espacenet or WIPO's PATENTSCOPE. Check the status (application or granted), the jurisdiction, and the dates. A granted patent can lapse if maintenance fees are not paid.
• Ownership. The named assignee should be the company. If a founder or a former employer owns the patent, the company may not have the rights it is describing. The USPTO's assignment records show transfers.
• Trademarks. Search the USPTO, the UK Intellectual Property Office and the EU Intellectual Property Office for the brand name. A conflicting earlier mark is a risk to the brand you are investing in.
• Similar patents. Patents owned by others that cover the same product are worth knowing about before a competitor raises them.

6. Search for litigation

Lawsuits are public, but they are spread across many courts.

• US federal courts: PACER holds federal dockets and filings. It charges $0.10 per page, capped at $3 per document, and waives fees for anyone whose charges are $30 or less in a quarter. CourtListener, run by the Free Law Project, offers a free archive of many federal dockets and documents.
• US state courts: each state runs its own systems, and coverage online varies widely. Check the state where the company is based and where it does most of its business.
• United Kingdom: The National Archives' Find Case Law publishes judgments from many courts and tribunals. Not every case ends in a published judgment, so absence there proves little.
• Elsewhere: national systems such as CanLII in Canada, AustLII in Australia and BAILII for the UK and Ireland publish judgments for free.

Search the legal name, any former names and the brand. A lawsuit is not automatically a red flag; most companies of any size are sued at some point. What matters is the kind of claim: fraud, unpaid wages, IP disputes over the core product, or disputes with former co-founders all go straight to the investment case.

7. Check regulators, sanctions and recalls

• Regulators. Search the SEC's enforcement actions and the FTC's cases in the US. In the UK, the FCA Register shows whether a firm is authorised, and the FCA Warning List names firms operating without permission. FINRA BrokerCheck covers US brokers and their firms.
• Sanctions. The US Treasury's OFAC sanctions list search and the UK sanctions list are free. Check the company, its parent and, with consent, the people who control it.
• Product safety. For health, medical and consumer products, openFDA (device and drug recalls, 510(k) clearances) and the Consumer Product Safety Commission's recall list show regulatory history that a deck will rarely mention. A medical device company that claims FDA clearance should have a matching 510(k) or other clearance record.

8. Look at the company's history online

• The Wayback Machine shows when the company's website first appeared and how its claims changed over time. A "trusted by" section that grows faster than the company could have, or customer logos that quietly disappear, are worth asking about.
• Domain registration data shows when the domain was registered. A domain registered last month for a company claiming years of trading is a question.

Remember that an archived page is still the company's own statement. It is evidence of what was claimed and when, not of whether it was true.

Red flags at a glance

• The legal entity is missing, dissolved, recently formed, or in a different country from the one claimed.
• Founders named in the deck are not on the register, or the register lists owners you were not told about.
• A Form D shows less raised than the deck, or different officers.
• Named customers have never mentioned the company themselves.
• Patents are pending, expired, or owned by someone other than the company.
• Lawsuits over fraud, unpaid wages, the core IP or a former co-founder.
• Regulator warnings, sanctions matches or product recalls.
• The deck's own numbers don't agree with each other.

None of these settles a decision on its own. Each one is a precise question to put to the founders, and how they answer is part of the evidence.

Doing this faster

Run by hand, this checklist takes days per company, mostly spent finding the right register and the right name. Evifound's research chat runs the same record searches from a single question, across company registers, SEC filings including Form D, federal spending, patents, court dockets, regulators and archived websites, and every finding links to the record it came from. The company's own statements never count as verification on their own.

• For deals and portfolio companies: Evifound for investment professionals
• For disputes, investigations and litigation support: Evifound for legal professionals