swissco

Swiss company data from the shell. Look a company up by UID, search 790,000 of them by name or by what they say they do, 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 four federal 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, and FINMA for authorised banks and securities firms.

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.

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".

Output

--format is the only thing that changes the output. A command piped into jq and the same command watched by a person produce identical bytes, so a script that works in your terminal works in CI.

table and csv are rendered from the same rows that json serialises, so a column cannot appear in one format and be missing from another. Progress notes go to stderr, where --quiet silences them; errors go to stderr as a single JSON object.

Use it from a coding agent

This repository ships an Agent Skill. It teaches Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and around twenty other agents how to drive swissco: the five commands, and the traps that quietly produce a wrong answer.

The skill is the directory .agents/skills/swissco/, the cross-client location every compliant agent scans, with .claude/skills/swissco symlinked to it so Claude Code finds it in its own. tests/test_skill.py asserts the spec's rules against it on every run, so the skill cannot drift out of the format without the suite saying so.

npx skills add prospex-ch/swissco-cli

It lands in the consuming project's own .agents/skills/swissco/, symlinked into each agent's directory. Add -g to install it once for every project, --all to accept the defaults without being asked. swissco still has to be on the path or reachable through uvx.

The agent can then answer questions like "which companies in Zug mention blockchain in their purpose" or "has anything changed at CHE-105.943.826 since June" by running the right command itself.

Access and terms

SHAB / Amtsblattportal. The REST API is the channel the operator offers for machine access: freely accessible, no authentication for published data, no documented rate limit, page size capped at 2,000. The website UI is disallowed by robots.txt, which does not reach the API. The operator disclaims completeness, and only the signed PDF is legally binding.

Zefix on LINDAS. Published on opendata.swiss, no credentials. Commercial-use terms have never been settled; the dataset page states what applies.

Zefix PublicREST. Requires credentials issued by zefix@bj.admin.ch. Every command here works without them. Supplying them through --user/--password or ZEFIX_USER/ZEFIX_PASSWORD adds capital, status, deletion date, former names and corporate relations to lookup, and a name-prefix search to search.

simap. The read API answers unauthenticated. The site's robots.txt disallows the single-page app's project-detail routes, which swissco refuses outright; it says nothing about /api, where every request here goes.

FINMA. Two published files, downloaded as any browser would. FINMA republishes rather than versions them, so they are cached for a week and re-fetched after that.

Being a good citizen

These are small public services run by federal offices. swissco sends one request every 0.5 seconds at most — one a second for FINMA, which asks for more room — backs off exponentially on failure, and identifies itself with a real User-Agent carrying this repository's URL. --interval can raise those floors and cannot lower them.

Built on

Package	Does
zefix-parser	Zefix: LINDAS SPARQL, PublicREST, UID validation
shab-parser	SHAB: discovery, fetch, parse, eleven-type event classification

Both are MIT and maintained alongside this one. simap and FINMA ship no client, so swissco carries its own for those two.

Watching more than a list

swissco watch from cron is the free version of what Prospex sells. Prospex watches the whole register continuously, joins it to hiring, funding, tenders and web signals — including the award side of simap that this tool deliberately leaves alone — and tells you which of those changes is worth a call. If a cron job and a UID list cover it, this tool is all you need.

License

MIT