How to verify a company before you pitch it

The short answer

Before you pitch a company an AI assistant researched, check three things a language model cannot reliably verify on its own: whether the company is actually registered and active, whether it holds the licences its industry requires, and whether its stated ownership is what it claims to be. Each check takes minutes against a public registry. Skipping them is how a confident-sounding dossier turns into an outreach message to a company that closed eighteen months ago.

Registry lookups

Every jurisdiction keeps a public business registry, and it is more current than anything a model was trained on. Singapore's is ACRA's BizFile; the UK's is Companies House; most US states run their own Secretary of State business search; OpenCorporates aggregates a large number of these into one search. Look up the exact registered name, not the trading name — a hospitality group operating as "Harborline" publicly might be registered under a completely different holding entity, and that's the name that actually matters for who you're dealing with.

What you're checking for: the entity is still active (not dissolved, not struck off), the registered address is plausible, and the registration date roughly matches what the company claims about its own history.

Licence checks

Regulated industries — clinics, tour operators, food and beverage, anything touching health or safety — carry licences a registry alone won't show. A clinic claims a certification; the relevant health authority's public register either confirms it or it doesn't. A tour operator claims a certain scale of operation; a tourism board licence register often lists exactly that. This is the check most often skipped because it takes an extra search, and it's the one most likely to surface something an AI dossier stated as fact but never actually verified.

Ownership overlap

The same director or the same registered address showing up across companies that present themselves as unrelated competitors is common, and it changes the pitch. Cross-reference the director names from the registry lookup against other active registrations — the same registry search that confirmed the company is active will usually let you search by director name too. Finding that a "competitor comparison" is actually two brands under one owner should change what you say, not just what you know.

What this replaces

None of this replaces AI research — it's the fifteen minutes after it. The AI assistant is genuinely good at synthesizing what's publicly visible about a company: its positioning, its likely pain points, a personalized opening line. It is not a reliable source for whether the company legally exists in the form it claims to. Treat the dossier as a draft that gets a real-world check before it becomes an outreach message.

Frequently asked questions

Isn't this what the AI research is already supposed to do?

No — an AI assistant synthesizes what's publicly visible and can present it confidently whether or not it's current. A registry lookup is a different kind of source: it can be outdated, but it can't be wrong about its own record the way a language model can be wrong about a fact.

How long does a verification pass actually take?

A few minutes per company once you know which registry to check — the registry lookup and licence check are usually a single search each. It's genuinely fast; the value is in doing it every time, not in it being complex.

What if the company doesn't turn up in the registry at all?

Treat that as a real signal, not a technicality — either the trading name differs meaningfully from the registered one (worth one more search) or the entity may not exist in the form the research assumed. Either way, verify before you pitch.