About Datasnoop

What Datasnoop is

Datasnoop is a searchable database of Belgian companies. It brings together three public data sources — the Belgian enterprise registry (KBO/BCE), the National Bank of Belgium's central balance sheet office (NBB/BNB), and the Belgian Official Gazette (Staatsblad/Moniteur belge) — and adds an AI-assisted layer that turns raw filings into plain-language summaries, comparable financial metrics, and discovery tools such as semantic search and find-similar-companies.

The product is aimed at people who need to understand Belgian companies quickly: corporate development teams, M&A advisors, investors screening for deal flow, credit analysts, journalists, recruiters, and anyone doing due diligence. It is not a marketing list and it is not a credit-scoring service.

Why we built it

The information that Datasnoop surfaces is, by law, public. Anyone with patience can assemble a picture of a Belgian company by visiting kbopub.economie.fgov.befor the registry, the National Bank's consultation portal for annual accounts, and the Official Gazette for legal publications. In practice, very few people have that patience. The data is fragmented across portals with different identifiers, different languages, different file formats, and different reporting templates. Comparing two companies side by side, or screening a sector against revenue and profitability thresholds, is impractical without aggregating the data first.

Existing commercial products in the Belgian market solve that aggregation problem but tend to price themselves at thousands of euros per seat per year, which puts them out of reach of independent advisors, smaller PE shops, journalists, and academic researchers. Datasnoop's goal is to make the same kind of consolidated view available with far less friction. The site is currently free.

Where the data comes from

Every fact you see on a Datasnoop company profile can be traced to one of three authoritative public sources:

• KBO/BCE registry— the legal identity of the company: enterprise number, name, registered address, NACE activity codes, juridical form, incorporation date, status, branches. We pull the official KBO data every night and patch in the daily updates, so what you see is almost never more than a day behind the registry.
• NBB/BNB annual accounts— the financial statements that Belgian companies are required to file with the National Bank above certain size thresholds. The trick: companies file in three different formats (micro, abbreviated, full). We translate all of them into the same plain numbers — revenue, EBITDA, EBIT, profit, total assets, equity, net debt, working capital, headcount — so a corner shop and a national chain compare cleanly on one screen, without you doing the math. Since April 2022 the National Bank publishes filings as structured machine-readable data; older paper filings are imported where available.
• Belgisch Staatsblad / Moniteur belge— the Belgian Official Gazette captures the drama of corporate life: appointments and dismissals, capital increases and decreases, statutory amendments, address moves, mergers, demergers, dissolutions, bankruptcies. Every notice gets linked to the right company and the right people, so a profile shows the full administrative timeline rather than today's snapshot. One profile, one timeline, no PDFs.

Everything on Datasnoop comes from official, public sources — the government, the National Bank, the Official Gazette. We don't scrape, we don't buy lists, and we don't infer personal data from anywhere private. What you see is what the law already makes public.

What we add on top

Aggregation alone is not enough. Datasnoop adds four layers that turn the underlying data into something useful:

• A normalised financial model.Belgian companies file in three different formats — micro, abbreviated, full — depending on size. We translate all three into the same plain metrics so a corner shop and a listed holding can sit side-by-side on the same screen.
• AI-generated summaries.For every company we write a short, factual narrative that explains what the company does and how its financials have evolved. Grounded in the company's own filings and, where available, its public website. The AI only writes what it can prove — if a fact isn't in the filings, the website, or a public news source, it doesn't make it into the summary. No hallucinations.
• Semantic search.A keyword search for “industrial bakery” misses companies that describe themselves as “artisanal patisserie supplier to the food service channel.” Semantic search retrieves both, because it operates on meaning rather than literal token matches. This is particularly useful in deal sourcing where you are looking for a category, not a specific name.
• A screener and a comparison tool. Filter by revenue, growth, margin, headcount, region, sector, distress signals, or recent NBB filing date; rank the shortlist; export it. Compare up to several companies side by side on the same metrics.

Limitations and honesty

We try to be straightforward about what the data does and does not tell you. Belgian financial filings are accurate but they are not real-time: a company that filed its most recent set of accounts in mid-2025 will not show 2026 figures until the next filing window. NBB JSON data is only structured for filings since April 2022; older statements may be missing some line items. Companies in liquidation or under insolvency proceedings appear with their pre-event filings until the registrar updates their status. Sector classification through NACE codes is only as fine-grained as the company's own declaration to the registry, which is occasionally generic. AI summaries are useful starting points but should not replace reading the underlying documents before making any decision of consequence.

How we operate

Datasnoop is run by a small independent team based in Belgium. The platform runs on European infrastructure, all data is processed in the EU, and the product is built to comply with the Belgian KBO open data licence and the General Data Protection Regulation (EU 2016/679).

We're here for research, not spam. The KBO rules forbid using this data for cold outreach, and we wouldn't want to anyway: no marketing-list exports, no email scraping, no ad targeting built from registry contents. If a feature would cross that line, we don't ship it.

Common questions

Contact and corrections

If you spot something that looks wrong — a misclassified sector, a mismatched address, a duplicated entity, a stale executive listing — please tell us. We can often correct presentation issues quickly and we systematically forward upstream registry errors to the relevant authority. Reach us at info@datasnoop.be for editorial questions, data corrections, partnership enquiries, or press requests.

For the legal small print, see our privacy policy and terms of use. For a tour of the product itself, the user guide walks through every feature.