Our unique public-benefit business model creates a virtuous circle. Our mission requires us to provide transparency and free access. This drives quality and trust, which in turn provides utility and brings value for our commercial users. And this then powers our mission.
Our Trust structure
Corporate structure for public benefit
OpenCorporates has a clearly-defined public benefit mission which is locked into the corporate structure and can’t be unpicked at the whim of the directors or shareholders.
Governance
The OpenCorporates Trust oversees the mission of OpenCorporates, ensuring we will neither drop it nor deviate from it.
Independence
Our independence is preserved for the long-term, ensuring that OpenCorporates cannot be bought, giving certainty to its users – public benefit and commercial – that it will always be available.
Our Trustees
Patrick Alley
Co-founder and director of Global Witness, the world’s leading anti-corruption NGO. Since co-founding Global Witness in 1993, Patrick has taken part in over fifty field investigations in South East Asia, Africa and Europe and in subsequent advocacy activities.
Esther Dyson
Executive founder of Wellville and chairman of EDventure Holdings, Esther is an active angel investor, best-selling author, board member and advisor concentrating on emerging markets and technologies, new space and health.
John Githongo
John is a veteran anti-corruption investigator, whose fight is told in Michela Wrong’s book It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower. He is now the CEO of Inuka, a Kenyan grass-roots NGO working to create an informed citizenry.
Mike Olson
Mike co-founded Cloudera in 2008, serving as its CEO until 2013 and as its chief strategy officer (CSO) until June of 2019. He was also heavily involved in setting up the Cloudera Foundation in 2017, and was Chair of the board of Datakind, which encourages the use of data science to solve humanitarian challenges.
Giannina Segnini
Giannina Segnini is the director of the Data Journalism Program at Columbia University in New York. She also leads Columbia Journalism Investigations, a team of post-graduate fellows who investigate cross-border collaborative stories using data.
Jane Wales
Jane Wales is CEO of the Global Philanthropy Forum and World Affairs, vice-president of the Aspen Institute, and host of the nationally-syndicated National Public Radio interview show World Affairs. Wales is the former Associate Director of the White House Office of Science Technology Policy, and Senior Director of the National Security Council.
A unique public benefit business model
Our unique public benefit business model creates a virtuous circle. Our mission requires us to provide transparency and free access. This drives quality and trust, which in turn provides utility that brings value for our commercial users. And this then powers our mission.
Commercial Benefit/Income
Quality and provenance provides structured data users can trust
Data Quality
Together with our deep domain + tech expertise, many eyes approach gives unrivalled data quality
Public Benefit
We make all our data freely available on the web (and as structured data to NGOs and journalists)
Many Eyes
Open access allows anomalies, errors, issues to be discovered faster, better