About Tianyancha

Tianyancha

Tianyancha, whose name means 'sky eye check', is a Beijing-headquartered business data and analytics platform founded in October 2014 by Dr Chao Liu. It aggregates public records on nearly 300 million entities across more than 300 data dimensions — corporate registration, equity structures and shareholder relationships, operational risk, litigation, enforcement and intellectual property — and sells access by subscription to consumers and businesses, and via APIs for compliance, risk monitoring and customer acquisition. Within a few years of launch it had passed 100 million users and become, in the description used at the University of Illinois, the No. 1 business investigation platform in China.

Founding and the 2014 data opening

Tianyancha was established in 2014, the same year China's National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System made business registration information publicly available across the whole network. Analysts of China's professional data industry note that this disclosure system was the cornerstone on which 'check' products such as Tianyancha and its main competitor Qichacha were built: without nationwide public disclosure of business information, a consumer-facing company-lookup product could not have existed. Tianyancha's founding in October 2014 placed it at the very start of that opening, turning newly public government data into a searchable commercial product.

Founder: Dr Chao Liu

Founder and chief executive Dr Chao Liu (Liu Chao) brought an academic data-mining background to the venture. He earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from Peking University in 2003 and a PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, specialising in data mining. Before founding Tianyancha he worked as a researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond from 2008 to 2012, and then served as chief scientist at Sogou, the Chinese search and input-method company, from 2012 to 2014; some biographies also record a chief scientist and director role connected with Tencent. In May 2017 he presented Tianyancha at the University of Illinois under the title 'The Heterogeneous Information Network of Chinese Enterprises', describing the company as an information network built from the public information of, at that time, 120 million Chinese enterprises.

What the platform does

Tianyancha's core product is a commercial query platform. It collects public information about enterprises from government agencies, industry associations, courts and other public sources, organises it as a dynamically evolving information network, and presents it so that a user can look up a company and immediately see its registration details, shareholders and equity relationships, changes over time, legal proceedings, enforcement actions, intellectual property and signs of operational risk. The platform's data model covers more than 300 dimensions per entity, and its records extend to nearly 300 million entities. For professional users, the same data is delivered through APIs and enterprise services used for due diligence, supply-chain verification, compliance checks, risk management and customer acquisition.

The underlying idea, as the company framed it at founding, was to address information asymmetry in the commercial sector by making public data more accessible. In a market with tens of millions of registered businesses, knowing whether a counterparty exists, who owns it, whether it is being sued and whether it has been penalised is basic commercial hygiene — but before platforms of this kind, assembling that picture required searching many separate official registers. Tianyancha's contribution was aggregation and presentation: one search instead of dozens.

Growth: monetisation and 100 million users

The company's consumer product turned profitable within a month of monetisation in 2017, an unusually fast result for a data business, and by March 2018 Tianyancha had passed 100 million users. That scale made it a routine reference in Chinese business life and journalism. News organisations used its data to illustrate stories about corporate behaviour at scale — for example, counts of companies registering with 'blockchain' in their name or business scope, which Tianyancha data put at more than 35,000 by April 2020, with their distribution across provinces and their closure rates broken down from its records. Academic researchers likewise used the database to identify firms and link them to government contracts and other datasets, treating it as an authoritative credit reference verified through official channels.

Credit reporting licence and state backing

In 2019 Tianyancha was among the first companies in its industry to receive an enterprise credit reporting licence from the People's Bank of China, the central bank — a formal regulatory status that distinguished licensed credit reporters from unlicensed data scrapers. The company was also described early on as supported by state venture capital. The licence and the scale of its user base together positioned Tianyancha not merely as a website but as part of China's formal credit-information infrastructure, at the boundary between commercial data services and the state's enterprise credit system.

Brand and public presence

Tianyancha invested heavily in becoming a household phrase. Its 2022 brand campaign popularised the slogan 'check business, use Tianyancha' — in Chinese, a short rhyming line that turned the company's name into the verb for the activity itself. That branding strategy mirrored the product's ambition: to be the default first check whenever a Chinese consumer or business dealt with an unfamiliar company, whether vetting a supplier, researching an employer, checking an investment target or verifying a partner.

Users and use cases

The platform serves both ends of the market. Individual users check companies before signing contracts, taking jobs or making purchases from unfamiliar sellers. Businesses use it for counterparty due diligence, shareholder and ultimate-beneficiary tracing through equity-penetration views, litigation and enforcement monitoring, intellectual-property searches and ongoing risk alerts on customers and suppliers. Financial and professional users draw on its API data for compliance, know-your-customer processes and market intelligence. Dealroom's company profile summarises the keyword space the company occupies: business data, corporate information, due diligence, enterprise credit reporting, shareholder structure, supply-chain verification, risk management, legal analytics and market intelligence.

Competition and industry context

Tianyancha's closest competitor is Qichacha, founded in Suzhou in the same year, 2014, on the same foundation of newly public enterprise credit data. The two platforms' parallel rise defined a new category in China's data industry — professional business information sold simultaneously to consumers as an app and to enterprises as data infrastructure. Industry analysts note how few pure-play listed companies exist in this 'commercial big data' sector, which made the leading private platforms, Tianyancha among them, the category's defining companies even without listings of their own. Tianyancha is headquartered in Beijing, in the same Haidian-centred technology ecosystem as many of the internet companies whose records its users look up.

Tianyancha today

From its October 2014 founding, Tianyancha grew into one of the most-used business information services in China: nearly 300 million entities indexed, more than 300 data dimensions, over 100 million users reached by 2018, profitability in its consumer product from its first month of monetisation, and an enterprise credit reporting licence from the central bank. Its name — the sky eye — captures the product's promise of seeing the whole corporate landscape at a glance, and its trajectory illustrates how the opening of government enterprise data in 2014 created, almost immediately, some of the largest professional data businesses in China.

That trajectory also made Tianyancha a standard tool far beyond its own marketing. When journalists needed to establish how many companies of a particular kind existed in China, when academics needed to identify firms and their characteristics for empirical research, and when businesses needed to check a counterparty before signing, the platform's aggregation of registration, equity, litigation and intellectual-property records was the practical answer — which is why its figures recur in news reports and scholarly papers alike.