About Qichacha

Qichacha

Qichacha, known internationally as QCC, is a Suzhou-based business information and credit data platform founded in March 2014 in Suzhou Industrial Park by Deqiang Chen and Jing Yang, and operated by Qichacha Technology Co., Ltd. A pioneer of mobile-first commercial inquiry in China, it provides business registration, shareholder, litigation and dishonesty, annual-report and intellectual-property data through web, mobile app and APIs, covering — by its own platform descriptions — more than 500 million enterprises worldwide. In 2025 Qichacha disclosed a prospectus applying for a main-board listing on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, a landmark initial public offering for China's professional data industry.

Founding in Suzhou Industrial Park

Qichacha was founded in March 2014 in Suzhou Industrial Park, Jiangsu province, by Deqiang Chen and Jing Yang; Jing Yang serves as chief executive. The timing was not accidental. China's National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System, launched by government departments in 2014, made company registration and credit information publicly available across the whole network for the first time, and analysts of the professional data industry identify that system as the foundation on which Qichacha and its Beijing competitor Tianyancha — also established in 2014 — were both built. Qichacha started as a website and a consumer app that let users in China look up information about any business entity, such as shareholder information, the identity of directors and lawsuits, and it distinguished itself early through a mobile-first design at a moment when commercial inquiry had been a desktop, professional activity.

What the platform provides

Qichacha's platform, at qcc.com, aggregates data from government and public sources and presents it as structured company intelligence. Its one-stop enterprise credit information big-data service platform — selected for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's 2023 Big Data Industry Development Demonstration List — provides more than 1,000 data feature tags based on fully open national industrial and commercial information and other sources. Through in-depth data mining it offers enterprise relationship maps, equity-penetration maps that trace ownership through layers of shareholders, risk monitoring, trademark and patent information, in-depth company reports, and bidding and tendering information. Crunchbase summarises the offer as business information, corporate shareholder information, lawsuit and dishonesty information and annual reports, enabling enterprises and investors to better understand the businesses they are interested in.

For enterprise users, the same capabilities are delivered through APIs and data services used in supplier verification, know-your-business onboarding, beneficial-ownership identification, anti-money-laundering screening and ongoing monitoring. International-facing services built on the platform describe real-time Chinese company verification, business licence validation, enterprise background checks and automated risk intelligence drawing on a data engine covering, in recent descriptions, more than 600 million Chinese entities with high-frequency updates.

Scale of the database

The platform's coverage grew steadily from its founding. Crunchbase recorded records on over 100 million companies in its earlier company descriptions; by the mid-2020s the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation described QCC as boasting an extensive database of over 500 million legal entities and having become a trusted source for businesses, investors and individuals seeking complete, real-time information about Chinese companies. Qichacha's own descriptions cite coverage of more than 500 million enterprises worldwide across 80 industry chains. PitchBook recorded about 639 employees at the company, reflecting the scale of its data, product and sales operations in Suzhou.

The GLEIF partnership and international identification

In February 2024 Qichacha joined the Global LEI Foundation's Vendor and Service Provider Relationship Group, entering the orbit of the global Legal Entity Identifier system — the international standard for identifying legal entities in financial transactions. Building on that step, GLEIF announced in April 2025 a certified LEI mapping initiative with QCC, establishing a certified link between the LEI and the QCC Code, with Qichacha publishing open monthly files mapping LEIs to its company records. GLEIF said certified mapping allows Chinese businesses listed on QCC's platform to realise greater identifiability and discoverability beyond China's borders. Jing Yang said the partnership underscored Qichacha's commitment to enhancing the international visibility of Chinese businesses. Qichacha has also launched an international version of its service aimed at users outside China verifying Chinese counterparties.

Data export clearance

Qichacha's international operations were tested by China's tightening rules on data sharing. Reuters reported in 2023 that Qichacha and similar databases had closed access to offshore users for months amid new data-export controls. Qichacha subsequently announced that it had successfully passed a data export security assessment by the Cyberspace Administration of China, giving it the green light to resume overseas operations. The company said it was the first company to pass the assessment for a platform providing inquiries into corporate creditworthiness data. The episode underlined the regulatory sensitivity of large-scale company-data platforms: their databases are commercial products, but they are built on national corporate records and are treated accordingly when the data crosses borders.

Data accuracy and the Ant Financial case

The risks of presenting time-sensitive corporate information were illustrated by Qichacha's dispute with Ant Financial. On 5 May 2019 Qichacha published, through its website, radar monitoring, daily reports and subscriber emails, news that a Chongqing internet micro-finance affiliate of Ant Financial had begun liquidation, rating the information at 'warning' level. The liquidation information did exist in the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System — but it was historical information from 2015, and Ant Financial had applied to terminate the liquidation in 2016. Ant Financial sued the platform's then operator, Suzhou Langdong Network Technology, for unfair competition and applied for an act-preservation injunction. The Hangzhou Internet Court, in its first act-preservation ruling in an intellectual-property-related dispute, ordered the operator to stop distributing the liquidation information, withdraw it from the platform's message centre and monitoring daily and from emails, and publish a clarifying statement on the Qichacha homepage. The case became a reference point in China for the responsibilities of data platforms when registry data is accurate in form but misleading in time.

The 2025 IPO application

In 2025 Qichacha disclosed its prospectus and applied for a main-board listing on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, with the application accepted by the exchange. Industry commentary described the filing as a major IPO for China's professional data industry, noting that in what Qichacha's own prospectus calls the 'commercial big data industry', there are very few pure-play listed companies on China's onshore A-share market. A successful listing would make Qichacha the public-market reference company for the business-information category that it and Tianyancha created in 2014 — and would subject its data business, built on public records, to the disclosure regime of a listed company.

Position in China's data industry

Qichacha's trajectory — from a Suzhou start-up with a mobile company-lookup app in 2014 to a platform covering hundreds of millions of entities, recognised in a national big-data demonstration list, certified in the global LEI mapping system, cleared through a national data-export security assessment and applying for a main-board listing — charts the maturation of China's commercial data industry as a whole. Together with Tianyancha, it defined the 'check a company' category for Chinese consumers and professionals, and its enterprise services now sit inside compliance, risk and customer-acquisition workflows well beyond China's borders.

Its backers reflect that standing: Crunchbase records five investors in the company, including Ren Capital and the Shanghai Angel Capital Guiding Fund, among the leading Chinese venture investors who supported it from its Suzhou base. The combination of consumer scale, enterprise API business, national recognition and international standard-setting partnerships is what the 2025 prospectus carried to the Shanghai Stock Exchange.