Business identity: a local problem in a global world
Anti-money laundering (AML) authorities expect regulated entities to maintain solid, up-to-date records on the businesses they serve, and to back that data with supporting documents. These requirements are a structural bottleneck for any financial actor seeking to scale internationally.
Picture a large e-commerce marketplace switching payment providers. Migrating means re-onboarding 15,000 merchants in 20 countries, each to verify under the new provider’s licence (a process known as KYB, know-your-business). No merchant can be locked out of the marketplace during the transition: the move is a commercial, operational, and risk challenge.
The PSP’s compliance team begins pulling company data to pre-fill the merchants’ KYB questionnaires. Register extracts from China, statutes from Germany, beneficial ownership filings from France. Each country has its own registers, formats, and rules for access. Trade is global, but business registration is inherently local.
The team goes looking for a vendor. They need a single integration that provides verified company data and documents across jurisdictions, at scale. They don’t find one. The providers are expensive, opaque on the data provenance, and built on legacy architectures with asynchronous document retrieval. None can deliver on a modern cross-border workflow: real-time, global, and traceable.
KYB data from the source
That PSP was named 1POINT6, a subsidiary of BNP Paribas, and two of its founders set out to build the solution they couldn’t find.
Topograph is the data layer needed for global KYB. It connects directly to official company registers and provides real-time, structured access to data and documents on a single endpoint. Business information is sourced on demand from the registers themselves, not from scraped or repackaged third-party databases.
The core principle is traceability: Topograph links every data point delivered to the exact official document it was extracted from. When a compliance officer pulls a company profile, they get the proof to back it up.
Today, Topograph covers 40 countries across Europe, Asia, and offshore financial centers. Its infrastructure consolidates and enriches fragmented company data from hundreds of official sources worldwide into instantly accessible and verifiable intelligence.
Who uses Topograph
Topograph is used by fintechs across the ecosystem. Neobanks like Hero use it to increase conversion in their B2B onboarding funnel and automate document collection. Buy-now-pay-later players such as Pledg monitor thousands of companies daily. PSPs like Lemonway save hours on manual verification previously handled country by country.
Topograph also partners with compliance software vendors in Europe and the US (e.g., Spektr, Dotfile, Harmoney, Aiprise) so their end-customers can benefit from high-quality company information in any pre-existing KYB solution.
“As a KYB orchestration platform, we need reliable company data and documents across jurisdictions. Topograph gives us direct access to official registers with structured, ready-to-use data — exactly what our clients expect from us.” — Aymeric Boëlle, President, Ondorse
The round
Topograph announces €2M in seed funding, led by UK-based leading VC Seedcamp, whose fintech portfolio includes Revolut, Wise and Pleo, with participation from early-stage funds Drysdale Ventures, Motier Ventures, Kima Ventures, and Better Angle.
“With the right data, leading financial institutions take compliance from an operational topic to a competitive advantage. We are thrilled to team up with Topograph as they tackle the challenge of reliable business identity globally. Banks and vendors automating compliance processes need proven data to ground AI agents in truth, and Topograph delivers exactly that.” — Sia Houchangnia, Partner, Seedcamp
What’s next
The round funds scaling Topograph from the current 40 countries to global coverage, starting with North America, Asia and the Middle East. The team will also push further on its AI capabilities for data extraction and enrichment from heterogeneous official sources.
The company aims to become the data infrastructure of choice for financial institutions and platforms embedding compliance into their products, wherever they operate.
Topograph’s work is well underway to make access to business register data a utility: reliable, traceable, affordable, and instant, regardless of the country.
The team
Topograph was created in 2024 by three co-founders with complementary backgrounds in fintech, legaltech, and engineering.
- Pierre-Henri Janssens (Topograph CEO) & Hugo Dellinger (Topograph CTO) were part of the founding team of 1POINT6, the start-up payment services provider of BNP Paribas, where they experienced the KYB data gap first-hand. Pierre-Henri’s previous experience includes fintechs Indy and Climb; Hugo held software positions at the leading European legaltech firm Doctrine.
- Emmanuel Scharff (Topograph COO) served as CFO/COO for six years at Doctrine, which pioneered the use of technology to make large amounts of public information accessible and valuable to legal professionals. Emmanuel started his career at the Boston Consulting Group in Paris.
About Topograph
Topograph is a B2B data infrastructure company that provides real-time access to official business register information via API and a web application. Topograph serves compliance teams, fintechs, and KYB software providers with structured company data, trade register extracts, and company filings — retrieved directly from official sources, on demand, with full traceability.
Topograph currently covers 40 countries across Europe, Asia, and offshore financial centers.
Inquiries: media@topograph.co