Problem

Global companies, financial institutions, and regulators increasingly need to know not just who their immediate counterparties are, but who ultimately owns them, what other entities they control, where goods actually move, and whether those networks connect to sanctions, forced labor, export-control, or financial-crime risk. Traditional name matching, static watchlists, and direct-counterparty checks stop too early, creating blind spots across subsidiaries, shell companies, nominees, co-registrants, and sub-tier suppliers while generating expensive false positives and manual review work.

The clearest “killer” use case is supply-chain and forced-labor compliance. Importers may have only a limited window to respond to a customs hold and must now demonstrate that goods are clean; Sayari’s example is identifying a Xinjiang connection at tier two or three before a shipment reaches the port and assembling source-documented evidence for regulators. The economic pain is therefore operational as well as regulatory: detained shipments, disrupted sourcing, investigation time, and the cost of reviewing noisy alerts. Sayari reports production-deployment reductions of 65% in manual ownership-verification time and 70% in screening-alert volume.

Product / Service

Sayari is an enterprise SaaS risk-intelligence platform built around a Commercial World Model, an ontology that encodes investigative tradecraft, and orchestration software for risk workflows. It combines primary-source corporate registries, ownership filings, court records, trade transactions, sanctions and denial lists, and other risk data into a unified graph. The platform describes coverage of 1.5 billion entities across more than 250 jurisdictions, while Sayari Graph resolves more than 500 million companies and includes billions of primary-source and trade records.

The delivery model combines a unified SaaS interface with products such as Graph for entity resolution and ownership-network analysis, Map for linking trade flows to corporate networks, Signal for continuous sanctions and regulatory monitoring, Guide for third-party-risk and due-diligence workflows, and API access for integration into customer systems. Sayari traverses ownership chains, resolves aliases and entities across sources, links legal ownership to physical trade activity, and makes flags traceable to source documents. The benefit is a faster, more defensible decision process: compliance and investigative teams can screen entire networks rather than names, find hidden relationships, monitor meaningful changes, and produce evidence that can withstand regulatory scrutiny.

Market

Sayari competes in the overlapping markets for corporate intelligence, counterparty and supply-chain risk intelligence, sanctions and export-control compliance, KYC/beneficial-ownership verification, and government economic-security technology. Its customer base spans regulators, law-enforcement and national-security agencies, financial institutions, and multinational enterprises. The competitive set includes Altana, which is positioned around trade-derived supply-chain mapping, and Moody’s, whose financial-data platforms Sayari positions as complementary rather than sufficient for ownership intelligence and sanctions coverage. Black Kite is an adjacent third-party cyber-risk platform with which Sayari integrated in 2026, rather than a straightforward direct substitute.

Sayari is a commercial, deployed business rather than a pre-revenue startup. Public company and investor materials say that, by 2023, its platform had more than 5,000 users across governments and Fortune 100 corporations, thousands of users in 35 countries, and a $7.8 million enterprise contract with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. In January 2024, TPG announced an up-to-$228 million strategic majority investment, citing trust from global regulators and more than 100 of the world’s largest public and private companies; Sayari also won government contracts across the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and the EU and was selected by the U.S. Department of Labor for forced-labor mitigation.