How to find newly registered companies in Switzerland (Zefix and SOGC explained)

Every working day, new companies are entered into the Swiss commercial register. For anyone who sells to businesses, accountants, insurers, agencies, lawyers and IT providers, those first days are the best moment to reach out, before the new owner has chosen their suppliers. This guide explains where that data lives and how to track it.

What counts as a newly registered company

A company exists, legally, once it is entered in a cantonal commercial register and published in the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce. The most common new legal forms are the GmbH (Sàrl) and the AG (SA). Switzerland registers tens of thousands of new entities a year, roughly 40'000 to 50'000, spread across all 26 cantons.

Zefix, the central business index

Zefix is the Federal Office of Justice's central index of every company in the Swiss commercial register. It brings the 26 cantonal registers into one searchable source, in German, French, Italian and English. Each record carries the details you need to understand a new business.

• Legal name and UID, the official identifiers you can cite.
• Registered office and postal address, with the canton and town.
• Purpose clause, a short description of the planned activity.
• Register entries, including the original registration date.

Zefix also offers a free public API (PublicREST). It now requires free credentials, which you request from the Federal Office of Justice, after which you can query companies and the daily gazette programmatically.

SOGC and SHAB, the daily gazette

New registrations are announced in the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce, known by its German initials SHAB, its French and Italian names FOSC and FUSC, and referred to in the API as SOGC. The gazette publishes every business day. A new company appears as a new entry, called Neueintragung in German, nouvelle inscription in French and nuova iscrizione in Italian.

This is the signal that matters for lead generation. The gazette tells you which companies were registered on a given day, so you can act while the business is genuinely new.

How to track new registrations day by day

1. 1Pull the gazette for each business day from the SOGC feed.
2. 2Keep only the publications that are new entries, not later changes or deletions.
3. 3Fetch the full record for each new company to get its address and purpose.
4. 4Filter by canton and by the kind of activity that matches what you sell.
5. 5Reach out quickly, because the first relevant supplier to make contact has the advantage.

From a register entry to a real conversation

The register gives you the company, its address and what it does. It does not hand you a direct phone number or email for the founder. To make contact you look the company up in public directories, or you send a short, relevant message to the registered address. The advantage is timing and relevance: you reach a brand-new business with an offer that fits its actual purpose.

That is the idea behind this service. We read every new Swiss company each business day, classify what it does, and match it to what you offer, so you can skip the manual steps above and start the conversation sooner.