swissco

Swiss company data from the shell. Look a company up by UID, search 790,000 of them by name or by legal purpose, list gazette publications, browse public tenders, check a bank licence, or watch a list of companies for change.

uvx swissco lookup CHE-444.420.929

All data comes from six open-data sources, none of which needs a credential: Zefix on LINDAS for the commercial register, the Amtsblattportal for the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce, simap.ch for public procurement, FINMA for authorised banks and securities firms, GLEIF for the Legal Entity Identifier and group structure, and ARAMIS for federally funded research.

Built and maintained by Prospex, a Swiss B2B sales intelligence platform.

Install

uvx swissco --help          # run it without installing
pip install swissco         # or install it

Python 3.14 or newer.

Docker

docker run --rm prospexch/swissco search "Nestlé" --limit 5

The image runs as an unprivileged user and keeps its state — watch's seen-ids and the cached FINMA files — in /home/swissco/.swissco. Mount a volume there for anything that needs to remember what it saw last time:

docker run --rm -v swissco-state:/home/swissco/.swissco \
  prospexch/swissco watch --uid CHE-105.909.036

Zefix credentials, which every command works without, are passed through as environment variables:

docker run --rm -e ZEFIX_USER -e ZEFIX_PASSWORD prospexch/swissco lookup CHE-105.909.036

Commands

Every command takes --format table|json|csv, --limit and --quiet.

swissco lookup

Everything the register publishes about one company.

$ swissco lookup CHE-444.420.929
legal name       Baumberger Bau AG
uid              CHE-444.420.929
chid             CH-036.9.103.786-9
ehra id          1702823
legal form code  0151
legal form       Schweizerische Zweigniederlassung im Handelsregister eingetragen
municipality     Koppigen
canton           BE
address          Hauptstrasse 6, 3425 Koppigen
purpose          Anbieten von Kleintransporte aller Art.
zefix uri        https://register.ld.admin.ch/zefix/company/1702823

Accepts CHE-444.420.929, CHE444420929, or the UID buried in other text.

swissco search

Companies by legal name or by statutory purpose: how a company describes what it does, in its own words, in the register.

$ swissco search "usinage" --canton VD --limit 5
LEGAL_NAME                             UID              LEGAL_FORM                                         MUNICIPALITY  CANTON  PURPOSE
-------------------------------------  ---------------  -------------------------------------------------  ------------  ------  ------------------------------------------------------------
Atelier roue libre S.A.                CHE-261.821.895  Aktiengesellschaft                                 Penthalaz     VD      La société a pour but l'usinage, la réparation, la révision…
Cute Cut Sàrl                          CHE-403.577.924  Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung GMBH / SARL  Lausanne      VD      la société a pour but toutes activités, notamment la fabric…
DecoupART CNC Sàrl                     CHE-342.723.896  Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung GMBH / SARL  Paudex        VD      la société a pour but tous types de travaux dans les domain…
LAVA Technologies Sàrl en liquidation  CHE-217.431.384  Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung GMBH / SARL  Nyon          VD      la société a pour but: développement de machines d'usinage …
Pousaz Mécanique SA                    CHE-166.712.190  Aktiengesellschaft                                 Oron          VD      La société a pour but l'exploitation d'un atelier mécanique…

--canton takes a two-letter code, --legal-form an eCH-0097 code (0106 is an AG, 0107 a GmbH).

swissco publications

Commercial-register publications from the gazette, in a date range.

swissco publications --canton ZH --since 2026-08-01
swissco publications --canton ZH --since 2026-08-01 --type CAPITAL_INCREASED

Without --type, only the list pages are read: one request per 2,000 publications. With --type, each surviving publication's body is fetched and classified into the eleven event types shab-parser recognises, so narrow the range and the canton first.

Ranges past about ten days are split into windows automatically. The API rejects any request whose page offset reaches 10,000, and the gazette publishes around a thousand commercial-register entries a day.

swissco events

One company's registry history.

swissco events CHE-444.420.929 --since 2024-01-01

The gazette's list pages carry no UID, only a title, so this resolves the UID to a legal name, keeps the publications whose title looks like that name, then fetches those bodies and keeps the events whose own UID matches. The title match decides what is worth downloading; the body's UID decides what is reported. Fetched bodies are cached under the state directory, so an overlapping re-run costs nothing.

swissco watch

What changed since last time.

printf 'CHE-444.420.929\nCHE-105.943.826\n' > uids.txt
swissco watch uids.txt --state ~/.swissco/

Each company is compared by fingerprint, a digest over its identity, address and purpose fields. Exits 10 when something changed and 0 when nothing did, so cron can branch on it:

0 7 * * * swissco watch ~/uids.txt --quiet --format json > ~/changes.json \
          || mail -s "registry changes" me@example.com < ~/changes.json

A UID that has left the dataset is reported as no longer in the dataset, never as deleted. LINDAS carries only active entities, so a UID can leave the dataset after a re-registration, a correction, or a publication lag.

swissco tenders

Public procurement projects from simap, by canton and publication date.

$ swissco tenders --canton ZG --since 2026-08-25 --limit 3
TITLE                                                  PROJECT_NUMBER  BUYER                           CANTON  CITY  PUBLICATION_DATE  PUBLICATION_TYPE
-----------------------------------------------------  --------------  ------------------------------  ------  ----  ----------------  ----------------
Neubau Pfarreizentrum, Katholische Kirchgemeinde Baar  22047           Katholische Kirchgemeinde Baar  ZG      Baar  2026-09-05        award

--canton and --type are repeatable; --lang picks which language the title and buyer are reported in. Paging is a cursor rather than an offset, so a wide range costs pages instead of failing.

The date range filters each project's newest publication, not the award inside it. A project awarded in March whose newest publication is an August correction appears only in a range covering August.

swissco vendor

Whether a company is registered as a supplier on simap.

$ swissco vendor CHE-409.633.691
name                   Egli Gartenbau AG Sursee
uid no                 CHE-409.633.691
city                   Sursee
canton                 LU
url                    https://www.gartenbau-egli.ch
company size           medium

A UID is resolved to a legal name, searched for, and then confirmed against the directory's own uidNo. The name finds the candidates; the UID decides between them — the directory holds both an "Egli Gartenbau AG Sursee" and an "Egli Gartenbau AG Uster".

There is no command for what a company has won. The supplier named on a simap award carries no UID, only free text typed by a procurement office. Matching those names would produce a plausible answer that is sometimes about a different company, so it is not offered.

swissco finma

FINMA's authorised banks and securities firms, joined to a UID.

$ swissco finma --uid CHE-105.845.287
name                  Aargauische Kantonalbank
city                  Aarau 1
licence type          Bank
supervisory category  3
uid                   CHE-105.845.287

Also swissco finma "Raiffeisen", --licence, --category, and --finma on lookup. Both files are cached for a week under the state directory.

Banks and securities firms only: FINMA licenses insurers, portfolio managers and fund management companies on separate lists this does not read. A miss means "not on this list", never "unlicensed".

swissco lei

A company's Legal Entity Identifier, and the group it is consolidated into.

$ swissco lei CHE-412.669.376
legal name                 UBS Switzerland AG
lei                        549300WOIFUSNYH0FL22
registered as              CHE-412.669.376
jurisdiction               CH
status                     ACTIVE
initial registration date  2014-12-15
direct parent              UBS AG (BFM8T61CT2L1QCEMIK50, CH)
ultimate parent            UBS Group AG (549300SZJ9VS8SGXAN81, CH)
direct children            0

--children lists what this company consolidates instead of counting it, and --lei on lookup folds the same fields into a company profile.

The parent is often foreign, and that is the reason to run this: a Swiss subsidiary's owner abroad has no commercial-register entry, so the register cannot answer the question at all.

GLEIF Level 2 records accounting consolidation: a parent is the entity that consolidates this one into its accounts, which it may do without owning all of it. About 28,000 Swiss entities hold an LEI against roughly 790,000 in the register, so a miss means "no LEI on file" and nothing more.

swissco research