Where Swiss Company Data Actually Lives
You sell B2B in Switzerland. Your pipeline depends on knowing which companies are growing, hiring, moving offices, or launching new products. That information exists. It is scattered across a dozen public registers, commercial databases, and social platforms. The hard part is pulling it together before your competitor does.
This guide walks through every major source of Swiss company data, explains what each one actually gives you, and shows where the gaps are.
The federal backbone: Zefix and SHAB
Zefix (Central Business Name Index)
Zefix is the federal search interface for all Swiss commercial register entries. Every company registered in any canton shows up here. You can search by name, UID (Unternehmens-Identifikationsnummer), or registered address.
What you get: the legal name, legal form (AG, GmbH, Einzelfirma, etc.), registered office, date of entry, and the UID. Zefix also links to the cantonal register for the full extract.
What you do not get: revenue, employee count, industry classification, or any operational detail. Zefix is a directory. It tells you a company exists and where it is registered. That is all.
Freshness: Zefix updates within one business day of the cantonal publication. New incorporations and mutations appear fast. Deletions too.
SHAB (Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce)
SHAB publishes the legal notices behind every Zefix change. When a company incorporates, changes its board, increases its share capital, or enters liquidation, the notice goes into SHAB. Bankruptcy proceedings, debt enforcement summons, and calls to creditors are published here too.
For a salesperson, SHAB is gold if you know how to read it. A capital increase often signals a funding round. A new board member might mean a strategic shift. A change of purpose clause can reveal a pivot. Liquidation notices tell you to stop prospecting that account.
The problem: SHAB publishes raw legal text in German, French, or Italian. No summaries, no filters by industry, no alerts. You can subscribe to an RSS feed for a specific company, but browsing for sales signals means reading through hundreds of notices daily.
Cantonal commercial registers
Each of Switzerland's 26 cantons maintains its own commercial register. Zefix aggregates them, but the cantonal register holds the full entry. The Zurich register, for example, lets you pull the complete entry with all historical mutations, signatories, and the current articles of association.
Some cantons offer more generous search than others. Geneva's register allows free-text searches across purpose clauses. Vaud's interface is minimal. The data quality is consistent (it is all legally required), but the accessibility varies widely.
| Source | What it covers | Update speed | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zefix | Name, legal form, UID, registered office | ~1 business day | Free |
| SHAB | Legal mutations, capital changes, liquidations, bankruptcies | Same day as publication | Free |
| Cantonal registers | Full entry, signatories, articles of association | Varies by canton | Free to search; extracts CHF 10-40 |
Commercial databases: Moneyhouse and its peers
Moneyhouse is the most widely used commercial company database in Switzerland. It aggregates register data with financial filings, management information, and network graphs. You can see who sits on which boards, which companies share directors, and (for many firms) the latest published annual accounts.
The free tier shows basic register data. The paid tiers unlock financials, credit ratings, and monitoring alerts. For sales, the monitoring feature is the most relevant: you get notified when a company you watch has a register mutation or a new financial filing.
The limitation is coverage of financials. Swiss law requires only certain company types and sizes to publish full accounts. Small GmbHs and Einzelfirmen rarely file publicly. That means Moneyhouse has financials for the larger AGs but often nothing for the SME segment where many B2B deals happen.
Other commercial databases serving the Swiss market include Dun & Bradstreet Switzerland, Bisnode, and Crif. They add credit scoring and international linkage. Their pricing puts them out of reach for individual salespeople. They are designed for credit departments and procurement teams.
Job boards as a leading indicator
A company that posts five engineering roles in Zurich this month is telling you something. It is growing, it has budget, and it will need tools and services to support those new hires.
jobs.ch is the dominant Swiss job board. Jobscout24 covers a similar market. Both let you search by company, location, and function. Neither offers an API for systematic monitoring.
LinkedIn job postings fill the picture for roles that companies publish on their own pages. Senior hires, international roles, and tech positions increasingly appear only on LinkedIn.
The sales signal from job postings is real but time-sensitive. A role posted today will be filled in four to twelve weeks. If you reach out after the hire is made, the signal is stale. Systematic daily monitoring matters here more than periodic checking.
Company websites and press
Website changes
The most honest signal a company sends is what it changes on its own website. A new product page, a rewritten "About us" section, a press release about an office expansion. These changes are public. They are authoritative. And almost nobody monitors them systematically.
The reason is practical: there is no central index of Swiss company website changes. You would need to crawl thousands of sites daily, diff the pages, and filter noise (cookie banners, footer copyright years) from real changes. That is infrastructure work, not a browser tab you can keep open.
Startup and tech press
Startupticker.ch covers Swiss startup funding rounds, product launches, and awards. It is curated, reliable, and free. If your target market includes growth-stage companies, this is a daily read.
General Swiss business press (Handelszeitung, Bilanz, PME Magazine) covers larger companies and M&A activity. Trade publications cover verticals. The content is valuable but behind paywalls and not structured for machine-readable use.
Trademark and IP registers
Swissreg is the official Swiss trademark and patent search portal, run by the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property (IPI). When a company files a new trademark, it often signals a product launch or brand refresh months before anything is publicly announced.
You can search by applicant name to see all trademarks filed by a given company. New filings are published weekly. The data includes the Nice classification (which tells you the product category), the filing date, and the applicant's address.
For B2B sales, trademark filings are a niche signal. Most salespeople ignore them entirely. But if you sell to marketing departments, agencies, or product teams, a fresh trademark filing is a conversation starter with real timing behind it.
LinkedIn and social signals
LinkedIn is where Swiss professionals live online. Company pages show employee count trends, recent hires, and published content. Individual profiles reveal job changes, promotions, and new roles.
The sales value is obvious. The operational problem is that LinkedIn does not want you scraping it. Their API is restricted to approved partners. Sales Navigator gives you alerts and filters, but at CHF 80-120 per month per seat. And even Sales Navigator does not cover register mutations, financial filings, or website changes.
LinkedIn is best at one thing: people signals. Who joined, who left, who got promoted. For company-level signals (funding, expansion, new products), you need other sources.
Federal Statistical Office (BFS)
The BFS publishes the Business and Enterprise Register (BUR), along with NOGA industry classifications, employment statistics by sector and canton, and business demography data (formations, closures, survival rates).
This is macro data. It tells you that the ICT sector in canton Zurich grew 4% last year, or that 12% of new companies fail within two years. It does not tell you which specific company hired five people last month.
BFS data is useful for territory planning and market sizing. It is not a prospecting tool. The publication lag is typically six to eighteen months.
Free vs. commercial: what you actually pay for
The raw data is mostly free. Zefix, SHAB, cantonal registers, Swissreg, BFS, job board searches, company websites. You can access all of it without paying a centime.
What costs money is making it usable:
- Aggregation. Pulling twelve sources into one view so you stop opening fifteen browser tabs every morning.
- Monitoring. Checking those sources daily so you catch the capital increase on the day it is published, instead of three weeks later.
- Filtering. Separating the signals that matter for your territory and ICP from the thousands that do not.
- Context. Seeing a SHAB mutation next to a job posting next to a website change, so the pattern becomes visible.
This is where commercial tools earn their price. Moneyhouse does it for financial data. Sales Navigator does it for people data. But no single tool covers the full surface of public Swiss company signals.
The gap between data and a usable signal
Having access to data is the easy part. Turning it into something you act on at 8 a.m. on a Tuesday is the hard part.
Consider what it takes to stay current on 500 target accounts using public sources alone. You would need to check Zefix for register changes. Read SHAB for legal notices. Scan jobs.ch and LinkedIn for new roles. Visit each company's website for changes. Search Swissreg for new trademarks. Follow Startupticker for funding news.
That is six sources, checked daily, for 500 companies. Even at one minute per company per source, you are looking at fifty hours per day. It does not scale.
The real cost of fragmented data is missed timing. You find out about the funding round two weeks after it happened. You notice the new VP of Sales because you ran into them at an event, not because anything alerted you. You discover the office expansion from a friend, not from the SHAB notice you never read.
Data freshness matters most in sales. The company that raised capital last week is buying tools now. The one that raised six months ago already chose its vendors.
How Prospex ties these sources together
Prospex monitors Swiss company signals across public sources and delivers them as a filtered morning feed. Register mutations from Zefix and SHAB. Job postings from major boards. Website changes detected by daily crawls. Funding and expansion news from press sources.
Each signal is matched to a company profile and scored against your ideal customer profile. You see the changes that matter for your pipeline, ranked by relevance. No tab-switching, no manual checking, no stale discoveries.
The result: you open one feed at 8 a.m. and know which accounts moved overnight. A capital increase at a target account shows up next to their three new job postings and the product page they rewrote last week. The pattern is visible. The timing is current.
You can try it with a free account and see what your target accounts published yesterday.