How to check a Ukrainian company in the state register

Why your search came back empty

You have a company name, a website and a founder who sounds credible. You put the name into a search box expecting a registration record, and nothing comes back. The reasonable conclusion is that something is wrong with the company.

It usually is not. Ukrainian companies are registered in an open state register that is free to search and needs no account, and the great majority of them are in it, filed correctly. What came back empty was the search.

Two things cause it and they compound. You searched a brand rather than a legal entity, and you searched in Latin script against a register that holds names in Ukrainian. Fix both and the record is usually the first result.

What follows is the order we work in when we build a company file. It is most of the first hour, almost all of it is free, and it is the part of diligence that nobody can talk you out of.

Start with the EDRPOU code, not the name

Every registered legal entity in Ukraine has an EDRPOU code: eight digits, unique to that entity. Companies rename themselves, rebrand, move address and restructure. The code stays put.

That makes it the only search key worth starting from. Ask for it on the first call, alongside everything else you ask for. It is not a sensitive number and there is no reason to withhold it.

A founder who cannot produce it within a minute is telling you something. Either the entity is newer than the pitch implies, or somebody else administers it, or the company being shown to you and the company that legally exists are not quite the same thing. None of those is necessarily fatal. All of them are worth knowing before the second call.

What the free state register actually gives you

The Unified State Register of legal entities and sole traders is run by the Ministry of Justice, open to anyone, and searchable by name or by EDRPOU code. What it returns is more than most people expect.

• The registered legal name and legal form, which is frequently not the brand on the website.
• Date of registration and current status: active, in termination, liquidated, suspended.
• The registered address.
• Founders, with the share each of them holds.
• The director, or whoever else is authorised to sign on behalf of the company.
• The ultimate beneficial owner, which Ukrainian entities are required to disclose above a 25% holding.
• The KVED activity code, the Ukrainian equivalent of NACE.
• Charter capital.

That answers most of what a first call would otherwise be spent on. You can see whether the entity was registered two years before the deck or two months after it, whether the founders in the register are the founders in the pitch, and whether the person offering to sign is authorised to sign.

Three more registers, and what each one is for

Registration proves a company exists. It says nothing about whether that company is being sued, owes money it has not paid, or has spent three years in front of a court.

1. 1The Unified State Register of Court Decisions holds judgments. Search the company and each founder separately: personal litigation against a director does not appear under the company name.
2. 2The register of enforcement proceedings covers unpaid judgments and asset restrictions. A company that lost a case and paid is a different proposition from one that lost a case and did not.
3. 3The aggregators. YouControl and Opendatabot sit on top of the same state sources and are considerably easier to work than the raw registers, with everything joined up and change alerts on top. Both charge for the convenience rather than for the data, and across a shortlist of thirty the subscription costs less than the hours.

Run the court search even when the registration record comes back clean. It is the step most often skipped and the one that most often changes the answer.

The name traps

Sixty-five of the 66 companies on our catalogue write their name in Latin script. The register holds the name that was filed in Ukrainian. That gap is the most common reason a search returns nothing, and nobody is at fault for it — a company writes its name one way for an international audience and another way on a registration form.

Ukraine does have an official romanisation standard, set by Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No 55 of 2010 and adopted by the United Nations as the international system for Ukrainian geographical names. Almost nobody applies it consistently, ourselves included: one company on our own catalogue has its city recorded in Cyrillic while all 65 others are in Latin.

So try the variants. The ones that catch people out:

• и and і arrive as either i or y, depending on who typed the form. Try both, in every position.
• х is kh in the standard and h almost everywhere else.
• ц is ts in the standard and c in practice.
• г and ґ come out as g or h with no consistency at all.
• Kyiv and Kiev are the same city, and older records use the second one.

If none of the Latin spellings work, ask the founder for the exact Ukrainian name and paste it in. That is a thirty-second question and it removes the problem completely.

When the company is not Ukrainian at all

Before spending an afternoon on the Ukrainian register, check that the entity you want is Ukrainian.

Ten of the 66 companies on our catalogue operate from outside the country — four in Poland, two in Spain, and one each in Estonia, Portugal, the United States and Canada. Every one of them is Ukrainian by team and by work. Several are not Ukrainian by registration.

The usual structure is a parent company in Delaware, Estonia or Poland sitting above a Ukrainian operating company, put together to make foreign investment straightforward. Where that is the case, the Ukrainian register holds the operating company and nothing else. The entity whose shares you would actually be buying is filed in another country, and you need that register too.

Ask which entity would issue the shares. One question, and it decides which registers you need to open.

What a registry check does not tell you

This is a floor, not a verdict. It establishes that a company exists, who controls it, and whether anyone has taken it to court. It says nothing about whether the product works, whether the revenue is real, or whether the team can build the thing they are describing. On this market that last part is unusually hard to check: not one company on our catalogue has filed a traction metric.

It also cannot show you what was never filed. Pre-seed rounds on this market are mostly unannounced and frequently undocumented in any public source, so no register will give you a funding history. For that you are back to asking the founder, and to what the catalogue can and cannot tell you.

We do not publish EDRPOU codes on company files. The catalogue records what a company does, where it is, what stage it has reached and what it is asking for, with the verified parts marked as verified. The registry work sits behind that, and goes in full into the files we build to order.

The check above takes about an hour per company once you know where to look, and rather less once you have done twenty. It is the hour that decides whether the next twenty are worth spending.