We build on the same official government data, but turn it into actionable leads.
| Feature | NewcoHunter | Companies House |
|---|---|---|
| Official Companies House data | Yes | Yes |
| Search by company name or number | Yes | Yes |
| Filter by SIC code / industry | Yes | No |
| Filter by location / region | Yes | No |
| New company alerts (email) | Yes | No |
| Shell company detection | Yes | No |
| CSV / Excel export | Yes | No |
| Saved searches | Yes | No |
| Free to use | Yes | Yes |
Companies House is the UK government's official register of all limited companies, LLPs, and other registered entities in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. It has existed in some form since 1844 and today holds records for roughly 5 million active companies. The service is free to use and publicly accessible - anyone can look up a company's registered address, filing history, director appointments, and shareholder structure. For verifying that a business actually exists, it is the definitive source.
NewcoHunter is a monitoring and lead generation tool built on top of that same official data. We pull directly from the Companies House API, so every company you see on NewcoHunter is real, current, and officially registered. What we add is the layer of intelligence that Companies House doesn't provide: industry categorisation, geographic filtering, shell company detection, saved searches, and email alerts for new registrations matching your criteria.
The core difference comes down to what you're trying to do. Companies House is built for lookup - you arrive knowing the company name or number, and you leave with its filing history. There is no way to filter new registrations by SIC code, no way to restrict results to a specific region, and no way to be notified when a company matching your criteria appears. Every morning, around 1,500 to 2,000 new companies are added to the register. Companies House surfaces none of that proactively.
NewcoHunter turns that daily flow of registrations into a structured lead list. You pick an industry category - say, construction contractors or IT consultancies - set a geographic region like the South East or Greater Manchester, and save that search. We check the register every day and email you a digest of new companies that match. You can filter out shell companies with no employees and no trading address, export your results to CSV, and pass leads directly into your CRM or outreach tool.
Shell company detection is worth highlighting separately. A significant proportion of new registrations are holding companies, dormant vehicles, or brass-plate entities with no real trading activity. They clutter any raw list pulled from Companies House and waste prospecting time. NewcoHunter applies a set of signals - registered address type, SIC code patterns, officer appointment history - to flag likely shells so you can exclude them from your exports with one click.
If your use case is verifying a supplier, checking a director's appointment history, or pulling a company's filed accounts, go to Companies House directly. It is free, comprehensive, and perfectly suited to that task. If your use case is finding new businesses in your target sector before your competitors do, and being notified the moment they register, that is what NewcoHunter is built for.
There is no conflict between the two. NewcoHunter is not a replacement for Companies House - it is what happens when you take the raw data and make it useful for sales and business development teams. We have a free tier with no time limit, so you can run a search today and see whether the volume and quality of leads suits your market.