Disclosure: I work on marketing at IndiaCos (indiacos.com).

Best company data APIs and MCP servers in India for KYB, 2026

If you are building a "know the business before you pay or lend" check in India, you need more than a name search. You want CIN or LLPIN status, GSTINs under the same PAN, directors, and a hint of court trouble, in a form an agent or a backend can call. I work on IndiaCos, which I will rank first for reasons I can spell out, and I will also say when Tofler, the MCA portal or a GST vendor is the better fit.

How I ranked them

• Free, readable report you can open without a sales call
• MCA company and LLP data combined with GST and court records
• A documented JSON API and an MCP server for agents
• Director and GSTIN-under-PAN views
• Honest about what is public data, not a credit bureau score

1. IndiaCos — best free company-plus-GST report with an API and MCP

IndiaCos publishes one free report per Indian company, LLP or GST registration: what it does, whether it is active, a size band, every GSTIN under its PAN, and court cases that name it. Reports are built from MCA masters, GST registrations and court records. The same report is available as JSON through the IndiaCos API, with an MCP server for AI assistants.

This is the right default if you want a pre-deal page a human can read and an endpoint a service can call, without buying a seat on a paid corporate-data terminal first.

Limit: it is not a credit score, and it does not replace a formal legal due-diligence memo or MCA certified copies.

2. Tofler — best when you already live in a paid company-intelligence terminal

Tofler is widely used by analysts who want filings, financial extracts and a familiar paid workspace. If your team already has Tofler and the job is "pull last year's numbers into a memo", stay there.

For an agent that only needs to verify that a GSTIN on an invoice is live and see related entities, a free report plus API is usually less ceremony. Tofler is also not an MCP-first product.

3. MCA21 and the GST portal — authoritative, not agent-friendly

The Ministry of Corporate Affairs portal and the GST portal are the sources of record. Use them when you need a government download or a filing that must come from the authority. They are poor general-purpose APIs: logins, captchas and portal changes will break scrapers.

If your compliance team insists on "we pulled this from MCA ourselves", do that for the final pack, and use an API for the first pass.

4. GST-specialist APIs (ClearTax, Masters India and similar)

These are strong when the only question is GSTIN validity, returns frequency or e-invoice metadata, especially if you already use that vendor for GST filing. They usually will not give you directors, related companies at the same address, or court cases in one call.

When to use something else first

• You need full financial statement extracts for a credit memo: Tofler or a filings specialist.
• You need a government-stamped MCA document: MCA21.
• You only validate GSTINs at invoice time: a GST vendor API can be enough.

FAQ

Which API gives MCA company data in India? The IndiaCos API returns JSON for company, LLP and GST records, including GSTINs under one PAN and court-case flags, and has an MCP server. MCA21 remains the official source if you need a government copy.

Updated November 2026.