There are roughly 359 million companies in the world. Only 44,000 of them are publicly listed. That means 99.99% of the global business landscape files no public earnings reports, no 10-Ks, and no quarterly disclosures. If your job depends on evaluating these companies, you have a data problem.

The Private Company Data Gap Is Massive

Public companies live under a microscope. The SEC, stock exchanges, and regulatory bodies force them to disclose revenue, margins, debt loads, and executive compensation on a quarterly basis. Analysts, investors, and journalists can pull up any listed company’s balance sheet in seconds.

Private companies operate under no such obligation. And they make up the overwhelming majority of the global economy.

Consider the scale. The OECD reports that approximately 44,000 companies were publicly listed worldwide at the end of 2024, with a combined market capitalisation of $125 trillion. Meanwhile, there are an estimated 359 million registered businesses globally, according to Statista and DemandSage research. That’s a ratio of roughly 8,000 private companies for every one public company.

This gap creates a structural challenge for any professional whose work requires financial visibility into private entities. PE analysts running due diligence. Credit risk teams assessing counterparty exposure. Lenders evaluating loan applications. Corporate development teams scoping M&A targets. They all hit the same wall: the company they need to evaluate simply doesn’t publish its financials.

Who Needs Private Company Financial Data (and Why)

The demand for private company financials cuts across multiple industries and roles. Here are the primary use cases driving search volume in this space:

• Private Equity and Venture Capital
  Global PE deal volume hit $1.7 trillion in 2024, up 22% from the prior year. Buyout investment value alone rose 37% year over year to $602 billion, excluding add-ons. PE firms are holding over 30,000 portfolio companies as of early 2025, nearly half acquired since 2020.
  Every single one of these deals required financial due diligence on a private target. Analysts need revenue trends, EBITDA margins, working capital cycles, and debt structures—none of which are available through public filings.
• Credit Risk and Lending
  Banks and alternative lenders evaluate thousands of private borrowers annually. A commercial lender underwriting a $10 million facility needs the borrower’s profit and loss statements, balance sheet, and cash flow history. Without standardised reporting, lenders either rely on self-reported figures (unreliable) or third-party financial data providers.
• Corporate Development and M&A
  Corporate buyers use private company financials to build target lists, estimate valuations, and model synergies. The middle market is especially active—95% of all M&A deals in 2024 were middle-market transactions, according to Akin Gump analysis. These deals almost exclusively involve private targets.
• Compliance and Counterparty Risk
  Regulated industries—banking, insurance, asset management—must assess the financial health of their counterparties as part of KYB (Know Your Business) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) requirements. Financial statements are a core input to these risk assessments.
• Traditional Sources of Private Company Financials (and Their Limits)
  Before evaluating any private company, it helps to understand where financial data actually comes from and why each source has limitations.

1. Government Registries and Corporate Filings

In many jurisdictions, private companies are legally required to file financial statements with their national business registry. The UK’s Companies House, France’s INPI, Germany’s Bundesanzeiger, and dozens of other registries hold profit and loss statements, balance sheets, and annual accounts for millions of companies.

This is the most authoritative source of private company financials. The data comes directly from the company’s own filings to a government body. It’s timestamped, traceable, and carries legal weight.

The challenge is access and scale. There are over 200 corporate registries worldwide. Each has its own format, language, filing cadence, and data structure. Pulling financials from Companies House is straightforward. Pulling the same data from a registry in Thailand or Brazil requires local knowledge, API access, and format normalisation. Doing this across 400+ million companies is a data engineering problem that most organisations can’t solve in-house.

2. Credit Bureaus

Companies like Experian, Equifax, and Creditsafe compile financial data on private companies and package it into credit reports. These reports often include estimated revenue ranges, credit scores, and payment behaviour data.

Credit bureaus are useful for a quick financial snapshot. But they have drawbacks. The underlying data is often modelled or estimated rather than directly sourced from filings. Coverage varies widely by country. And the data can lag behind actual financial performance by 6–12 months.

3. Data Aggregators

Platforms like PitchBook, Capital IQ, and Bloomberg Terminal aggregate private company financials from various sources—press releases, self-reported surveys, filings, and news articles.

These platforms offer broad coverage and strong search tools. But the data provenance is often unclear. You may not know whether a revenue figure came from an audited filing, a press release, or an estimate. For compliance-sensitive use cases, that ambiguity is a problem.

4. Self-Reported Data

Some private companies voluntarily share financials with platforms like Crunchbase (for startups) or industry databases. This data is valuable when available, but it’s inconsistent, unverified, and skewed toward companies that have an incentive to share—typically those seeking funding or partnerships.

What Financial Statements Actually Tell You About a Private Company

Once you get your hands on a private company’s financials, what should you look at? The three core statements—profit and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow—each reveal different aspects of financial health.

Statement	What It Shows	Key Metrics to Extract
Profit & Loss (Income Statement)	Revenue, cost of goods sold, operating expenses, net income over a period	Revenue growth rate, gross margin, EBITDA margin, net profit margin
Balance Sheet	Assets, liabilities, and equity at a point in time	Current ratio, debt-to-equity, working capital, total assets
Cash Flow Statement	Cash generated and spent across operating, investing, and financing activities	Operating cash flow, free cash flow, cash burn rate, capex-to-revenue

For PE due diligence, the profit and loss statement is typically the starting point. Analysts want to see whether revenue is growing, whether margins are stable, and whether earnings quality is consistent over time.

For credit risk, the balance sheet matters most. Lenders need to see the asset base, the debt load, and the liquidity position. A company with growing revenue but deteriorating working capital is a red flag.

For counterparty risk and KYB, all three statements are relevant. Compliance teams need a complete picture of financial health to assess whether a counterparty is a going concern or a potential default risk.

A Practical Framework for Evaluating Private Company Financials

Whether you’re evaluating a potential acquisition target, a new supplier, or a borrower, this five-step framework provides a structured approach.

Step 1: Verify the Source

Start with the most authoritative data available. Government registry filings are the gold standard—they’re legally submitted, timestamped, and tied to a specific company identifier (like a UK company number or French SIREN). If you’re using third-party data, check whether the provider can trace the data back to its original source.

Step 2: Normalise the Financials

Private companies report in different formats, currencies, and accounting standards (IFRS, local GAAP, etc.). Before you can compare companies, you need to normalise the data into a common structure. This means converting currencies, standardising line items, and aligning reporting periods.

Step 3: Calculate Core Ratios

Once the data is normalised, calculate the ratios that matter for your use case:

Ratio	Formula	Why It Matters
Revenue Growth Rate	(Current Revenue – Prior Revenue) / Prior Revenue	Shows momentum. Declining growth is a red flag for PE buyers.
Gross Margin	(Revenue – COGS) / Revenue	Indicates pricing power and cost structure.
EBITDA Margin	EBITDA / Revenue	Core operating profitability. The most common PE valuation input.
Current Ratio	Current Assets / Current Liabilities	Measures short-term liquidity. Below 1.0 signals cash stress.
Debt-to-Equity	Total Debt / Total Equity	Leverage indicator. Critical for lenders and credit analysts.
Free Cash Flow	Operating Cash Flow – Capex	Cash available for growth, debt paydown, or distributions.

Step 4: Benchmark Against Peers

A private company’s financials are meaningless in isolation. You need context. Is a 12% EBITDA margin good or bad? It depends on the industry, the geography, and the company’s stage. Benchmarking against peers—other private companies of similar size and sector—gives you the context to judge performance.

This is where scale matters. If your data provider only covers 10,000 companies, your peer set is thin. If they cover 400 million, you can build statistically meaningful benchmarks across any industry vertical.

Step 5: Cross-Reference with Non-Financial Data

Financial statements don’t tell the whole story. Cross-reference them with corporate structure data (who owns the company?), director and officer information, digital footprint signals, and industry context. A company with strong margins but a recent change in directors and a spike in adverse media may not be as healthy as the P&L suggests.

The Numbers: Why This Matters Now More Than Ever

Several macro trends are making private company financial data more valuable—and more urgently needed—than at any point in the last decade.

• Global PE dry powder: $1.2 trillion as of September 2025, down from a record $1.3 trillion in December 2024. That capital needs to be deployed—and deployment requires financial due diligence on private targets.
• PE holding periods: The average hold period for exited portfolio companies reached 8.5 years in 2024, more than double the 4.1 years observed in 2007. Longer holds demand deeper ongoing financial monitoring.
• Exit backlog: PE firms are sitting on 30,000+ portfolio companies. Nearly half were acquired since 2020. Exits are running at a pace that would take 8–9 years to clear the backlog.
• Global M&A rebound: Global PE deal volume rose 22% in 2024. US deal value climbed another 8% in H1 2025. Middle-market add-ons—74% of all PE deals—almost exclusively target private companies.
• Financial data services market: Valued at $24.2 billion in 2024, growing at 8.5% CAGR. Spending on financial market data hit a record $44.3 billion in 2024, rising 6.4% year over year.
• Regulatory pressure: AML/KYB regulations are tightening globally. Compliance teams need verified, traceable financial data—not estimates or models.

How MonetaIQ Solves This Problem

MonetaIQ provides financial data on over 400 million private companies and 60,000 public companies worldwide. The data is sourced directly from stock exchanges, government registries, and regulatory filings—not aggregated from third-party databases or scraped from the web.

Here’s what that means in practice:

1. Full Financial Statements, Not Summaries
   MonetaIQ delivers complete profit and loss statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements. Not estimated ranges. Not modelled outputs. Actual filed financials, normalised into a consistent structure so you can compare a German Mittelstand company to a UK limited company to a Brazilian LTDA.
2. Coverage Across 200+ Registries
   MonetaIQ connects directly to over 200 government registries worldwide. This means coverage in jurisdictions that most data providers miss—not just the UK, France, and Germany, but markets across Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East.
3. Data Delivery That Fits Your Stack
   Whether you need a single company profile or financial data on millions of entities, MonetaIQ delivers through:
   – API access — Real-time lookups for on-demand financial profiles and credit reports. Integrates directly into your CRM, risk engine, or deal pipeline.
   – Bulk data feeds — Full-file downloads for analytics teams, data science workflows, or integration into proprietary databases.
   – Platform access — A web-based interface for one-off research, screening, and company profiling.  
4. Ownership and Corporate Linkage
   Financial statements are more useful when you know who owns the company. MonetaIQ provides corporate ownership structures and group linkage data covering 378 million entities. This is critical for UBO (Ultimate Beneficial Owner) identification and consolidated financial analysis.
5. Credit Reports
   Beyond raw financials, MonetaIQ provides credit reports that synthesise financial data into actionable risk assessments. These reports combine financial ratios, payment behaviour, and registry data into a single view of counterparty risk.

The Evaluation Checklist

Before committing to any private company financial data source, ask these questions:

Question	Why It Matters
Where does the financial data come from?	Registry-sourced data is verifiable. Modelled data is not.
How many companies are covered?	Benchmarking requires scale. 400M+ is enterprise-grade.
Are full financial statements available, or just summaries?	Summaries hide red flags. Full P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow are essential.
How is the data delivered?	API, bulk feed, and platform access cover different workflows.
Does the provider include ownership and corporate linkage?	Financial data without ownership context is incomplete.
How current is the data?	Stale financials create false confidence. Check update frequency.
Can you trace the data back to the original filing?	Compliance teams require an audit trail. Provenance is non-negotiable.

The Bottom Line

Private companies represent 99.99% of the global business landscape. They drive the majority of GDP, employment, and economic activity in every country. Yet the financial data infrastructure for evaluating them remains fragmented, incomplete, and often unreliable.

The organisations that solve this data gap—that build reliable, scalable access to private company financials—will have a structural advantage in deal sourcing, credit underwriting, risk management, and compliance.

MonetaIQ exists to close that gap. With financial data on 400+ million companies, sourced directly from 200+ government registries and stock exchanges, delivered via API and bulk feed, MonetaIQ gives PE firms, lenders, compliance teams, and data platforms the financial intelligence they need to make decisions with confidence.

Get started with MonetaIQ

Explore our financial data API, bulk feeds, and credit reports at monetaiq.com.

Request a free trial or speak with our data team to discuss your use case.