The reason we built this.
The moment that started this: a competitor was selling FMCSA carrier data behind a $499/month subscription. I downloaded the exact same dataset from data.gov in twenty minutes, for free. The middlemen weren't normalizing or enriching anything — they were just selling the search bar.
The incumbent data vendors have a real business. They normalize messy government files. They deduplicate across sources. They enrich with phone + email verification. That work has value.
But the $15K/yr pricing isn't about the work. It's about the lock-in: annual contracts, enterprise sales cycles, proprietary APIs that make switching impossible. Smaller buyers — insurance brokers, regional factoring shops, boutique staffing agencies — can't write those checks. They either overpay or go without.
Empire Data Solutions exists to solve that.
What we do
We aggregate public records from 40+ U.S. federal and state agencies — FMCSA, NPPES, SEC, state licensing boards, FDIC, FCC — normalize them within each source into consistent schemas, and verify each row before delivery. Cross-source deduplication and entity resolution is the genuine ML research problem we're tackling under NSF SBIR Phase I — see our research page. We publish pricing. We sell flat files. No annual contracts.
Why government-sourced only
- Provenance. Every record can be traced to an agency filing. Compliance teams can verify us.
- Public records, directly sourced. Public records explicitly designated for re-use. No third-party resellers, no laundered feeds — every row traceable to its source filing.
- Durable. Our source isn't LinkedIn's ToS or a third-party reseller's inventory. It's statute.
- Unique. No competitor focuses on government aggregation at this breadth. Most blend public + private data and can't tell you which is which.
The company
Principal Investigator (NSF SBIR Phase I)
What we won't do
- We won't sell private-sourced data as "verified" or conflate it with government records.
- We won't annual-contract small buyers into lock-in pricing.
- We won't ship records without a data dictionary, legal basis statement, and verification timestamps.
- We won't claim SOC 2 we haven't earned, testimonials we haven't collected, or record counts we haven't verified.