1,571,537 African companies indexed — my "Pappers for Africa" hit 1.57M records
Three months ago I started scraping African company registries because I kept hitting the same wall: verifying whether a company in Lagos or Dar es Salaam actually exists is either impossible or costs $50 per lookup on legacy databases.
Fylings just crossed 1.57M companies across 18 African registries, Nigeria (739k), Mauritius, Tanzania, Zambia, Ghana, Madagascar, Uganda, and a dozen more, including OHADA-region registries almost nobody has digitized.
Along the way it picked up things I didn't originally plan:
- 1.2M beneficial-ownership records across 551k companies
- 500k+ government procurement awards linked to the companies that won them
- 88k resolved director/owner profiles connecting companies to each other
- A free MCP server, so ChatGPT and Claude users can query the registry data directly
The lookups are free. The bet is the same one Pappers made in France: be the place where "verify [company] Nigeria" resolves, then monetize the deep data (ownership reports, API, monitoring).
Early signals: AI crawlers love it (ClaudeBot fetches ~12k pages/day), and the search traffic that converts best is Chinese importers verifying African suppliers — a use case I never predicted.
Happy to answer anything about scraping government registries at scale (the CAC enumeration run alone went from 200k → 739k Nigerian companies in 36 hours).
The part I found most interesting wasn't the scale—it was the unexpected demand.
You set out to build verification infrastructure for African companies, but one of the strongest signals came from Chinese importers. Those kinds of discoveries often say more about where a business should focus than the original hypothesis. Paying close attention to them can end up shaping the company more than the initial vision.
You've nailed exactly what's been on my mind. I built this assuming the users would be African banks and fintechs doing KYB. Instead, Bing analytics showed China as my #4 country, with queries like "verify Nigerian company" in Chinese search patterns, importers checking whether the supplier asking for a 30% deposit actually exists.
It makes sense in hindsight: China-Africa trade is ~$280B/year, most of it between small trading companies that have no way to check each other out. A Guangzhou electronics exporter can't exactly walk into the CAC office in Abuja.
I haven't pivoted the product around it yet, the data moat (registries + beneficial owners + gov contracts) serves every use case equally. But it's changed my thinking on two things: a Chinese-language landing page is probably worth more than my next registry integration, and "verify before you wire the deposit" is a much sharper pitch than "company intelligence platform.
That's a fascinating shift.
Reading your reply, I found myself thinking about one implication of following that demand signal. I'd be happy to share the reasoning, but I'd rather do it properly than compress it into a thread.
If you're interested, what's the best email to reach you on?
you can reach me on hello@fylings,com happy to connect.
Thanks! I’ve just sent it over.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts whenever you have a chance.
Hey! I came across your Indie Hackers posts about Fylings and was genuinely impressed by the scale of what you've built. Indexing over 1.5 million companies across 20 African registries—and making that data actually searchable—is a huge engineering achievement.
I also liked that you shared the unexpected insights, like AI crawlers becoming a major traffic source and Chinese importers verifying suppliers. Those kinds of discoveries are often the most interesting part of building.
I'm building PulseBoard, an AI-powered uptime monitoring platform, so I really appreciate products that are built around collecting reliable data first and then using it to generate useful insights.
Congrats on the milestone! I'm looking forward to seeing how Fylings evolves.
Thanks Haseeb! Reliable data first, insights second, that's the whole game. Good luck with PulseBoard.