Delaware Secretary of State Business Search

The state of Delaware makes it relatively simple to look up business information through the website of the Secretary of State. Below we'll walk through the steps for doing this, and show you some additional resources you might not know about.

There are any number of reasons you might need this information. It's absolutely critical when performing due diligence and for Know Your Client (KYC) purposes. If you're only performing these kinds of searches occasionally, Delaware's search portal allows you to find the information you're looking for quickly and easily. If you're searching records like these in high numbers, there are some tools you'll want to know about, but we'll come back to that in just a moment.

You can find the search page, hosted by the Division of Corporations, linked above. The search interface, found in the middle of the page, looks like this:

As you can see, the interface is rudimentary, only allowing a search by business name or File Number. There are no advanced search options offered, nor can you filter or limit your results in any way. The site also requires you to complete a captcha challenge every few times you search.

When you perform the search, you'll be directed to the results page, which looks like this:

The results are sorted by company name in alphabetical order. You cannot reverse the default order, or sort by another field. The search is only able to return 50 results at a time (as you can see by the error message at the top). One would think that a few more search filters could help narrow down the number of results.

The only information visible on the results page is the File Number for each business, and the entity name.

Clicking on the business name for any of the records will bring you to the Entity Details page for that business. Those pages look like this:

There isn't much more information to be found here. Aside from the company name and file number, you'll find the date the company was formed, the type (legal structure) of the entity, the state in which it is based, and name and contact information for the Registered Agent. Any more information is only available for a fee.

The header links only direct you to an information page (https://icis.corp.delaware.gov/Ecorp/FieldDesc.aspx#REGISTERED%20AGENT%20INFORMATION) which defines each header term and gives the options you might find in that field.

Delaware offers only very limited business information at no cost, and their search interface is rudimentary, making searches cumbersome (especially when you run into the captcha challenges). If you need to search for hundreds - or even thousands - of these records each month, this would quickly consume a lot of time. Furthermore, Secretary of State data is different from one state to another, so combining and integrating data from multiple states is complex.