Identity
Bixel IDs, the two entity kinds, how resolve answers, what an ID guarantees, and the attribution block.
Bixel Identity is the free layer under everything else: one permanent ID per company, two kinds of entity, and one resolver that turns whatever you have (a name, a domain, a registry number) into that ID with evidence. It is unmetered on every plan, the free account included.
Bixel IDs
An ID looks like bxc_6y0d3p6f83jm: the prefix bxc_ and 12 characters from a 30-symbol alphabet (0123456789bcdfghjkmnpqrstvxyz, no vowels, no l), so anyone can write a validator. IDs are opaque: no country, no kind, no sequence. Input is case-insensitive; output is lowercase. bx_ is the API-key prefix and is rejected, never echoed.
What an issued ID guarantees:
- Never reused, never deleted. Every ID ever issued resolves forever: to a current entity, to a redirect, or to a retirement notice. The API never answers 404 for an issued ID.
- Merges keep the trail. When two IDs turn out to be one thing, one survives and the other redirects to it; the answer carries the chain, and a three-deep chain resolves to the terminal survivor.
- Corrections are dated events. A wrong merge or retirement is reversed by a new, evidenced event; nothing is rewritten.
- A well-formed ID that was never issued answers
unresolvedwith reasonunknown_id, notinput_invalid.
Every ID has a page at https://bixel.com/id/<bixel_id>, which forwards to the company record when one is published.
Two kinds
| kind | what it is | how you look it up |
|---|---|---|
brand | an operating presence people know by its own name or domain: a company as the market knows it, a product with its own site | domain, URL, name |
legal_entity | a registered company on an authoritative register | LEI, Companies House number, CIK, name plus jurisdiction |
A kind never changes on an ID. A company with one site and one registration has two IDs and a dated operates link between them; a resolve answer for one always links the other when the link is evidenced. Which ID should you store? The brand ID if you care about the company people know; the legal-entity ID if you care about who signs the contract. Both survive every lifecycle event.
Resolving
GET /v1/resolve?identifier=... takes one input and classifies it itself: a Bixel ID, a domain or URL, an email address (the domain after the @), a LinkedIn or Crunchbase company URL, an LEI (checksum-validated), a CIK, a Companies House number, a Wikidata QID, or a name with an optional jurisdiction. POST /v1/resolve/batch takes a list of the same shape. Full parameters in the reference.
Every parseable request answers HTTP 200 with a result_type; problem documents are for protocol errors only (a missing parameter, an oversize body, authentication).
| result_type | meaning |
|---|---|
resolved | one entity, at or above the inferred evidence tier, with evidence references |
redirected | the input was a merged ID, a former domain or a former identifier; the answer carries the survivor and the chain |
ambiguous | more than one plausible entity; candidates are listed, never picked by popularity |
unresolved | no entity, or evidence below the bar; the reason says why and what would resolve it |
not_a_company | valid input that is not an organisation (a consumer mail domain, a government body) |
retired | the ID existed and was retired with no successor |
input_invalid | the input could not be normalised (a malformed value, a personal profile URL, a key-shaped string) |
Matches carry an evidence tier, attested, corroborated or inferred, and the references behind it; there is no numeric confidence score anywhere in the contract. Reason codes are an open list: tolerate values you have not seen.
Attribution
The identity data is published under CC BY 4.0; the identifiers themselves (the Bixel IDs, the crosswalk, lineage and deletions) are dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0, so anyone can key on them with no notice at all. Every resolve answer, abstentions included, carries the attribution block to pass through:
"attribution": {
"source": "Bixel",
"url": "https://bixel.com/id/bxc_6y0d3p6f83jm",
"license": "CC-BY-4.0",
"notice": "from Bixel",
"data_version": "2026-09-21T14:40:12.000Z"
}Works you produce from the data are yours; attribution is the only condition. The paid product sells live access, change history, proof bundles and monitoring, never a licence exemption.