OSINT
Open-source intelligence — gathering and analyzing information from publicly available sources. It's the discipline behind a company dossier: public record only, no privileged access.
The working vocabulary of company research, OSINT and due diligence — defined plainly, with links into the file where each term comes to life.
Open-source intelligence — gathering and analyzing information from publicly available sources. It's the discipline behind a company dossier: public record only, no privileged access.
The practice of researching competitors and a market to inform strategy. A dossier on a rival is a fast way to start.
The investigation a buyer, investor or partner runs before committing to a deal. A dossier is the lightweight, public-source brief that usually comes first. See the due-diligence use case.
The descriptive attributes of a company — industry, size, location, revenue band, ownership. The "demographics" of a business, and the backbone of the overview section.
Data about the technology a company uses — its languages, frameworks, vendors and tools. Read as the tech fingerprint in a dossier.
The specific set of technologies a company builds and runs on, from databases to analytics tools. Useful for a pitch, a partnership, or sizing up a competitor.
A map of how a company is structured — who leads, who reports to whom, and where the depth sits. A dossier renders a sketch of it from public signals.
A public archive of historical web pages. It lets researchers see how a company's site, claims and positioning have changed over time.
Inspecting a domain's public DNS records to learn about a company's web infrastructure and online footprint — a standard OSINT technique.
Ideal Customer Profile — the type of company a business sells to best. Dossiers help sales teams confirm whether a target fits the ICP. See the sales use case.
Total, Serviceable, and Serviceable Obtainable Market — nested estimates of market size, from everyone who could buy to the slice you can realistically win.
A secure, private repository of documents shared during a deal for formal due diligence. The opposite of a dossier, which is built entirely from public sources.
Know Your Business — the compliance process of verifying the identity and legitimacy of a business entity, the corporate cousin of KYC.
Ultimate Beneficial Owner — the real person who ultimately owns or controls a company, even through layers of holding entities. A key target of ownership research.
Standard industry classification codes (US and international) that label what a business does. They make firmographic data sortable and comparable.
An inferred read on a company's size and growth, drawn from public traces like job postings and team pages, when an exact employee count isn't published.
The rate at which a company is opening roles and growing teams — an early indicator of momentum, direction and funding, surfaced by the hiring radar.
Pinning each claim to the public source it came from. In a dossier, every line is sourced so you can verify it and dig deeper. Central to how it works.
Flagging how well-supported a claim is — an official filing is firmer than a figure inferred from a job ad. It keeps a dossier honest about its own certainty.
A network view of a company's customers, partners and rivals — reading a business by the company it keeps. The relationship web in a dossier.
A surfaced item worth a second look — a lawsuit, layoffs or a reputation note. A dossier surfaces these rather than burying them, so nothing surprises you later.
The body of information anyone can lawfully access — filings, news, posted jobs, company sites. A dossier is built from the public record only.
Determining that scattered references all point to one real company, and not two with similar names. The first step in building a clean dossier.
A company's physical and operational presence — its offices and locations, plotted on a map rather than listed as addresses.
New to all this? Read what a company dossier is, see how one is built, or open a sample file to watch these terms in context.
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