Home › Guides › India B2B data
The India B2B data stack: filings, suppliers, tenders and hiring
Indian business data is unusually rich if you know which four sources to combine. Corporate filings give you legal identity and financials; B2B marketplaces give you supplier firmographics with tax IDs; the procurement portals publish who actually won, at what price; and job boards give hiring velocity. This guide covers all four layers and what each one is genuinely good for.
Layer 1 — Corporate filings (MCA)
The Ministry of Corporate Affairs registers every Indian company and assigns a CIN: 21 characters that encode listing status, industry, state, year of incorporation and company type. The identifier is informative before you even query it.
Filings give directors (with DIN identifiers), paid-up and authorised capital, balance-sheet figures, registered charges, subsidiaries and AGM dates. For KYB, due diligence or credit work on an Indian counterparty, this is the authoritative layer.
One field deserves attention when matching by name rather than CIN: Indian brands frequently differ from legal names. Zomato files as ETERNAL LIMITED; Paytm as ONE 97 COMMUNICATIONS LIMITED. A name-matching score that penalises brand-to-legal-name distance will reject correct matches — we measured exactly this and removed the threshold rather than lose true hits.
Indian company filings by CIN →
Layer 2 — Supplier firmographics (IndiaMART)
India's B2B marketplaces list millions of suppliers that never appear in a Western database. The useful part is not the product catalogue but the tax identity attached to each listing: GSTIN, IEC (import-export code), CIN, legal status, turnover band and employee band.
GSTIN is worth understanding because it validates offline. It is 15 characters with a check digit, the first two encode the state, and characters three to twelve contain the holder's PAN — whose fourth character reveals whether the holder is a company or an individual. That single field lets you filter sole proprietors out of a supplier list before making a single request.
Two honest limits from our measurements. Phone numbers are PNS virtual numbers — they route through IndiaMART's exchange rather than ringing the supplier directly. And supplier "websites" are overwhelmingly IndiaMART-hosted catalogue pages rather than independent domains. Treat the value as firmographic depth, not direct contactability.
IndiaMART supplier firmographics →
Layer 3 — Public procurement, including who won
India runs procurement through several portals: CPPP as the central aggregator, GePNIC instances for central and state bodies, and GeM for the government marketplace. Together they publish live tenders with EMD, tender value, inviting authority and document lists.
GeM is the layer worth singling out, because it publishes outcomes. A measured award row:
{
"bidNumber": "GEM/2026/R/736658",
"category": "Examination Answer Books (V4) Conforming to IS 5195",
"organisation": "Directorate Of Elementary Education",
"sellerName": "BEDI BROS PRINTING PROFESSIONALS",
"rank": "L1",
"sellersInBid": 2,
"totalPriceExact": "₹5,30,000",
"quantity": 1000000
}Winner, rank, price and the number of competing sellers. Most procurement systems worldwide publish the opportunity and go quiet about the result — this is competitive pricing intelligence that simply does not exist in most markets.
India government tenders & GeM winners →
Layer 4 — Hiring velocity
India's tech hiring happens on local boards rather than the ATS platforms common in the US and Europe. The useful shape here is not the individual job post but the company-week velocity row: how many roles a company opened this week, in which functions, with which skills — a growth signal per employer, without personal data.
India tech hiring signals → · For the ATS-based equivalent elsewhere, see hiring signals from ATS job boards.
Combining the layers
| Question | Layer |
|---|---|
| Is this company real, and who controls it? | MCA filings — CIN, directors, capital |
| Can it supply what I need, and is it GST-registered? | IndiaMART — GSTIN, IEC, turnover band |
| Does it sell to government, and at what price? | GeM award records |
| Is it growing? | Hiring velocity + MCA financial trend |
| Is it listed, and what did it just announce? | NSE/BSE filings |
The CIN is the spine. Once you have it, the other layers attach: GSTIN contains the PAN which ties back to the entity, procurement records name the seller, and hiring data keys on the company name.
Data protection: India's DPDP Act
India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act changes the calculus for supplier data specifically. A large share of IndiaMART listings are sole proprietorships, where the "company" is a person — the GSTIN's PAN character reveals this. Company-level firmographics are business information; a list of sole proprietors with phone numbers is closer to personal data. Filtering proprietorships out by default is the conservative build, and it is what we do.
The CIN encodes the company's history
India's Corporate Identity Number is 21 characters, and unlike most registration numbers it is not opaque — each segment carries meaning:
| Segment | Encodes |
|---|---|
| First character | Whether the company is listed or unlisted |
| Next five digits | Industry classification |
| Two letters | State of registration |
| Four digits | Year of incorporation |
| Three letters | Ownership and company type |
| Final six digits | Sequential registration number |
This is genuinely useful. Listed status, sector, state and incorporation year are all derivable from the identifier itself — no lookup required. A CIN alone lets you filter a list by state and company age before you have enriched a single record, which is a rare efficiency in company data.
It also makes validation cheap: a malformed CIN is detectable from structure, and a CIN whose encoded state contradicts the address you were given is a flag worth raising.
The caution is that the encoded fields reflect registration, not the present. A company that has moved its operations to another state keeps the state letters it was registered with, and the industry classification is as of incorporation. Read them as history — which, for company-age and origin questions, is exactly what you want.
Frequently asked questions
What is a CIN?
India's 21-character Corporate Identification Number, encoding listing status, industry, state, incorporation year and company type.
Can GSTIN be validated without a lookup?
Yes — it carries a check digit, so malformed numbers are detectable offline. It also encodes state and the holder's PAN.
What makes GeM data unusual?
It publishes outcomes: winning seller, L1 rank, total price and the number of bidders. Most procurement systems publish only the opportunity.
Are IndiaMART phone numbers direct?
No — they are PNS virtual numbers routed through IndiaMART's exchange.