The LSE Directory / Fundamental data
Dun & Bradstreet is a commercial data, analytics and decisioning company. Its core asset is the Data Cloud, a database the company says covers more than 500 million business entities worldwide, built from tens of thousands of public and proprietary sources and organized around the D-U-N-S Number, a nine-digit identifier the company created in 1963 to uniquely track individual business entities and their corporate family trees. Products built on that data include D&B Finance Analytics and D&B Credit Intelligence for financial risk assessment, D&B Hoovers for sales prospecting, and D&B Direct+, a REST API that serves the underlying data as "data blocks" (identity, principals, hierarchy, financial, beneficial ownership, ESG and risk) that customers can combine per use case. D&B's customers span credit and finance, procurement and supplier risk, compliance, and sales and marketing teams at enterprises, government bodies and small businesses. Its differentiation versus other data vendors rests on the D-U-N-S Number as a de facto standard identifier (widely required by government contracting bodies and used to resolve corporate hierarchies across subsidiaries and parents) and on data breadth and validation processes, rather than on a narrower specialty such as market or alternative data. The company traces its history to July 20, 1841, when Lewis Tappan founded The Mercantile Agency in New York to supply merchants with credit information on customers; Robert Graham Dun acquired it in 1859 and renamed it R.G. Dun & Company, and the modern Dun & Bradstreet was formed by its 1933 merger with John M. Bradstreet's rival credit-reporting firm. It reported 2024 revenue of approximately $2.38 billion and roughly 6,200 employees. The company went private in February 2019 under an investor group led by CC Capital, Cannae Holdings and Thomas H. Lee Partners, returned to the NYSE (ticker DNB) on July 1, 2020, and was taken private again on August 26, 2025 when Clearlake Capital Group completed a $7.7 billion acquisition (including debt), delisting the stock. In June 2026, Dun & Bradstreet announced it was bringing its D&B Commercial Graph, described in the announcement as covering more than 500 million business entities, into agentic AI platforms via Model Context Protocol integrations with OpenAI (ChatGPT and Codex), Microsoft 365 Copilot and Anthropic's Claude, aimed at letting users pull D-U-N-S numbers, corporate hierarchies, credit scores and firmographic data directly into AI-assisted workflows for onboarding, compliance, finance and risk use cases.
