Developer API

Brønnøysund (BRREG) API

Norwegian company lookup — Enhetsregisteret, Foretaksregisteret, and business verification through one normalised surface.

Raw registry rows are not a company lookup

The registries return data, not answers. A direct integration has to fetch from more than one register, normalise the role and status shapes, cache responsibly so you are not hammering a public service, and stay within the open-data reuse terms. Apier does that once and exposes a single normalised company context, NLOD-licensed, with a 24-hour freshness window and a 7-day stale-on-upstream-failure ceiling.

Enhetsregisteret

The Central Coordinating Register for Legal Entities is the broadest register — every registered Norwegian entity has an entry. It carries the organisation number, name, organisational form (AS, ENK, NUF, and the rest), NACE industry code, registered municipality, and current status, including whether the entity is dissolved. Whether the entity is registered in the VAT register (registrertIMvaregisteret) is part of this record too.

Foretaksregisteret

The Register of Business Enterprises covers entities engaged in commercial activity and carries the legally binding role detail: signaturrett (signing authority), prokura (power of procuration), daglig leder, and board members. This is where you confirm not just that a company exists, but who is authorised to bind it. An AS appears in both registers; an entity without commercial activity may appear only in Enhetsregisteret.

Business verification

Combine the two registers and you have a know-your-business check: confirm the organisation number is valid, the entity is active rather than dissolved, the NACE code matches the claimed line of work, and the person signing up is named in signaturrett or prokura. Apier returns these as structured fields — role-holder names and role codes from the public register, never fødselsnummer or other national identity numbers — so the verification logic in your product reads one shape.

• Active-status check. Status and dissolved state in one field, so an onboarding flow can reject a struck-off entity.
• Signing-authority check. signaturrett and prokura as structured roles — the registry half of an acting-capacity decision.
• VAT-registration check. mva_registered as a free Tier 1 tri-state value (registered, not registered, or unknown).

What a lookup looks like

Start against the zero-auth sandbox, then point the same client at the production host. The Tier 1 Brønnøysund fields are on the free tier.

# Zero-auth sandbox — synthetic fixture org 999999999.
# Tier 1 Brønnøysund fields: name, entity_type, nace_codes, status,
# municipality, signaturrett, prokura, mva_registered.
curl https://www.apier.no/api/v1/sandbox/public/company/999999999/summary

# Production — Tier 1 Brønnøysund data on the free tier.
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer apier_live_<your_key>" \
  "https://www.apier.no/api/v1/company/991825827/context"

What developers build on it

• Know-your-business onboarding — verify an organisation number, status, and signing authority before opening an account.
• Enrich a CRM or ledger with normalised company data: name, organisational form, NACE, municipality, VAT-registration status.
• Give an AI agent the registry context it needs before it reasons about a company's obligations or attempts an action.

FAQ

What is Brønnøysund (BRREG)?

Brønnøysundregistrene (the Brønnøysund Register Centre) operates Norway's foundational business registers, including Enhetsregisteret and Foretaksregisteret. They are the authoritative source for a Norwegian organisation's number, name, organisational form, NACE industry code, registered address, status, and signing authority.

What is the difference between Enhetsregisteret and Foretaksregisteret?

Enhetsregisteret is the central coordinating register — every registered entity has an entry with its organisation number, name, organisational form, NACE code, address, and status. Foretaksregisteret is the register of business enterprises engaged in commercial activity; it carries the legally binding role detail (signaturrett, prokura, daglig leder, board). An AS appears in both; a non-commercial entity may appear only in Enhetsregisteret.

Is Brønnøysund company data free to use?

The Tier 1 registry data Apier surfaces from Brønnøysund is public-sector information reused under the NLOD open-data licence, available on the free tier and through the zero-auth sandbox. Only the gated Tier 2 commercial metrics (employee count, turnover, balance-sheet total) require an Altinn delegation. Role holders are returned with their public-register names and role codes exactly as they appear in Enhetsregisteret and Foretaksregisteret; Apier never returns fødselsnummer or other national identity numbers.

Can I verify who is allowed to sign for a company?

Yes. The company context surfaces signaturrett and prokura as structured role data, plus the organisation's status so you can confirm it is active rather than dissolved. That is the registry half of an acting-capacity check; resolving whether a specific actor may take a specific action also draws on the Altinn delegation model.

Does the lookup include VAT (MVA) registration status?

Yes. Whether a company is registered in the VAT register (registrertIMvaregisteret) is a free Tier 1 fact from Enhetsregisteret — no delegation required. It is exposed as mva_registered on the summary and context responses, as a tri-state value (registered, not registered, or unknown when the registry has not yet been read).

Related developer pages

• Altinn for AI agents — agents that consume company data before acting on it.
• Altinn API — the delegation layer that registry roles resolve against.
• Maskinporten API — the brokered auth underneath the gated surfaces.
• Documentation and the Apier home page.

Get started

The sandbox returns synthetic Brønnøysund-shaped data with no signup; the docs cover the full company context shape and the Tier 1 / Tier 2 split.