> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.bigdata.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Resolve companies

Financial analysts need to surface the news and documents that carry real insight about a universe of securities, without the noise of unrelated mentions. To make that possible, RavenPack has built and maintains a Knowledge Graph of more than 7 million companies worldwide, and identifies these entities in every piece of structured data it processes so you can pinpoint relevant content with precision.

The first step in any financial workflow built on Bigdata is therefore to **resolve your universe of securities into RavenPack IDs**. Once you have those IDs, you can use them as filters across any of the Bigdata services to unlock the following value:

✅ **Continuity**: Retrieve all the data linked to a company even after it changes its name or ticker, so your history stays complete. <br />
✅ **Precision**: Get only the content where the company was actually detected, avoiding the noise of similar names that refer to something unrelated. <br />

## Resolving your universe

The recommended endpoint depends on the type of entity you want to resolve. Use the tabs below to find the right approach for each one.

<Tabs>
  <Tab title="Public companies or ETFs">
    The most reliable way to resolve public companies is through a market identifier: an **ISIN**, **CUSIP**, **SEDOL**, or listing (in `MIC:Ticker` form). Bigdata exposes a dedicated `get` endpoint for each of these, and every endpoint accepts up to **500 identifiers in a single request**, so even large universes can be resolved with very few API calls.

    | Identifier             | Endpoint                                                                           |
    | :--------------------- | :--------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
    | ISIN                   | [`/v1/knowledge-graph/companies/isin`](/api-reference/companies/get-by-isin)       |
    | CUSIP                  | [`/v1/knowledge-graph/companies/cusip`](/api-reference/companies/get-by-cusip)     |
    | SEDOL                  | [`/v1/knowledge-graph/companies/sedol`](/api-reference/companies/get-by-sedol)     |
    | Listing (`MIC:Ticker`) | [`/v1/knowledge-graph/companies/listing`](/api-reference/companies/get-by-listing) |
  </Tab>

  <Tab title="Private companies">
    Private companies don't have market identifiers, so the most reliable way to resolve them is by their **official website**, or by a combination of **name and country**. The [`/v1/knowledge-graph/companies`](/api-reference/companies/find-by-details) endpoint accepts either signal and returns the **top 20 candidate matches** ranked by relevance. In most cases the first result is the company you were looking for.

    This endpoint resolves a single company per request, so to process a universe of private companies you need to send multiple queries in parallel. The reference scripts below show how to do this with multi-threading while staying within Bigdata rate limits.
  </Tab>
</Tabs>

<Tip>
  RavenPack IDs are stable and do not change over time. We recommend persisting them in a database within your platform so you only need to resolve your universe once.
</Tip>

## Try it yourself

<Card title="How-to scripts: resolve company IDs" icon="github" href="https://github.com/Bigdata-com/bigdata-docs-resources/tree/main/how_to_guides/api_get_company_ids">
  Ready-to-run scripts that resolve both public and private companies optimally, using multi-threading while respecting Bigdata rate limits.
</Card>