Person & Company lookup

Person & Company lookup

August 18, 2014

I'm excited to announce the launch of two new APIs into our private beta:

  • Person API:
    Find all the social information associated with an email address,
    such as name, Twitter handle, Facebook handle and LinkedIn handles.

  • Company API:
    Find all the company information associated with a domain name,
    such as name, amount raised, employee count, and Twitter handle.

Let's dive straight in and see what a Person lookup request looks like.

Looking up an email address

Our API is based on REST and JSON. Fetching information is as simple as running a curl command, although we also provide bindings in your language of choice. Let's look up my personal email address: alex@alexmaccaw.com


curl 'https://person.clearbit.co/v1/people/email/alex@alexmaccaw.com' \
        -u APIKEY:

  {
    "id": "d54c54ad-40be-4305-8a34-0ab44710b90d",
    "name": {
      "fullName": "Alex MacCaw",
      "givenName": "Alex",
      "familyName": "MacCaw"
    },
    "email": "alex@alexmaccaw.com",
    "location": "San Francisco",
    "bio": "Ruby Dev",
    "twitter": {
      "handle": "maccaw",
      "followers": 14993,
      "following": 1645
    },
    "linkedin": {
      "handle": "pub/alex-maccaw/78/929/ab5"
    },
    "github": {
      "handle": "maccman"
    },
    "facebook": {
      "handle": "amaccaw"
    }
    //...

Notice all you need provide is an email address - APIHub returns all the social profiles and data we can find linked to the person behind that email address. You can find a full list of returned attributes in our documentation.

Practical uses

Both APIs have far reaching uses from customer analytics and sales to fraud prevention. For example:

  • Run an email list through the Person API finding high value subscribers (say with a lot of Twitter followers).
  • Run up every sign up to your site through both the Person and Company APIs, alerting you to high value clients and also giving you some context about your customers.
  • Make sure an email address has some social context behind it to reduce credit card fraud.

Data sources

All this data is obtained from running a huge cluster of machines indexing the web--essentially building a search engine that's specific to people and companies rather than web pages.

Next steps

These two APIs are just the start of many. Our mission is
to give our customers the kind of data APIs a modern business needs,
from customer analysis, geolocation and fraud prevention to background
checks and address verification.

We want to build awesome data APIs so you can focus on building great products.


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