Check if a startup is active before outreach

Most directories tell you a company exists. They rarely tell you whether it still does anything. Before you spend time on outreach, you need five minutes of signal work, and most teams skip it entirely.

Quick answer: To tell if a startup is still active before outreach, check five signals: recent job postings, regulatory or government filings, product updates or shipping evidence, named pilot customers, and grant or demo milestones within the last 12 months. Any two or more current signals puts a target on your short list; zero signals is a pass.

Why "active" is harder to verify than it looks

A company can be legally registered, listed in three databases, and completely moribund. Founders move on. Funding runs out. Pivots stall. The company keeps its profile alive because nobody bothers to take it down. FounderNest's 2026 Scouting and Deal Sourcing Report, based on 1,500-plus dealmakers, finds that corporate teams miss 40 to 60 percent of the relevant market using standard sourcing methods. But the inverse problem is just as real: a meaningful share of what they do find is no longer worth pursuing.

The 20-minute check below is not due diligence. It is the pre-step: filter before you write the first email.

The 5-signal checklist

Run these in order. Stop when you have two green signals. If you reach the end with zero, move on.

Signal 1: Hiring activity in the last 90 days

A company with no open roles is not necessarily dead, but a company actively hiring for engineers, sales, or delivery staff is almost certainly operating. Check LinkedIn Jobs, the company's own careers page, and job boards like Glassdoor or Indeed. What you are looking for is specificity: a generic "we're hiring" banner means nothing. A live posting for a senior controls engineer or a field deployment technician means the company has a funded pipeline to fill.

Job postings older than 90 days on LinkedIn are often auto-renewed rather than genuinely live. Sort by date posted, not relevance.

Transferable rule: If a company is hiring roles that require onboarding a customer, it has a customer to onboard.

Signal 2: Regulatory filings or government records updated recently

In most jurisdictions, active companies leave a paper trail: annual returns, patent applications, import/export filings, or environmental permits. In the US, check the SEC's EDGAR for public or semi-public entities, USPTO for recent patent activity, and state business registries for annual report dates. In Japan, the National Tax Agency's corporate database and J-PlatPat for patent filings cover most industrials. In South Korea, DART (the Financial Supervisory Service's disclosure system) and KIPRIS for IP are the equivalent.

A company whose last government filing was 18 months ago and whose last patent application was three years ago has a different risk profile from one that filed an IP continuation last quarter.

Patent grants lag applications by 18 to 36 months, so look at the application date, not the grant date.

Transferable rule: Government filings are the one data source a company cannot fake by updating its website.

Signal 3: Product shipping evidence

"We are developing" is the least informative phrase in a startup profile. You want evidence of shipping: a software changelog with recent commits, a press release announcing a version release, a customer case study with a date, or a product announcement tied to a named partner. On GitHub, the commit history on a public repo is timestamped. For hardware or industrial companies, check trade press and logistics records. Shipping or installation announcements appear in trade journals that cover energy, manufacturing, and maritime before they appear anywhere else.

This signal is particularly relevant for the energy and manufacturing targets Chibit's corporate clients source. A company claiming "commercial-ready" but with no shipping evidence and no press from the last 12 months is worth a direct question before any further investment of time.

Transferable rule: Shipping evidence that names a customer or a date is worth 10x an undated product page.

Signal 4: Named pilot customers or commercial partners

A logo wall on a website proves nothing. A named reference to a pilot in a press release, a grant report, a conference presentation, or a LinkedIn post from the company's own team is signal. Look for specificity: who the customer is, what the scope was, and whether there is any indication of continuation or expansion.

For corporate buyers, a pilot with a company in your industry is especially useful. It tells you the target has navigated procurement at an organization like yours, which reduces integration risk and compresses your evaluation timeline. For teams sourcing in Japan or South Korea, where keiretsu relationships and chaebol supply chains are often the proof of commercial validity, named industrial partners carry more weight than venture funding.

Chibit surfaces this kind of partnership signal as part of vetting. The goal is to hand a team a short list where the basic activity check has already been done, rather than leaving it to each analyst to run manually per target.

Transferable rule: A named pilot with a company you recognize is more predictive of M&A fit than a funding round of equivalent age.

Signal 5: Grant, award, or demo milestone in the last 12 months

Government grants and program awards (SBIR/STTR in the US, Innovate UK, NEDO in Japan, KEIT in South Korea, EU Horizon grants in Eastern Europe) require active reporting. A company that received a grant stage-gate payment last quarter has been vetted by a program officer for exactly the things you care about: technical progress, team continuity, and commercial plan. Demo days at established accelerators—Y Combinator, Plug and Play, MassChallenge, or sector-specific programs in clean energy and industrial tech—serve the same function, with a date attached.

This is also one of the more underused signals in corporate sourcing. Teams check funding rounds; fewer check whether the company completed a program milestone, which is often more current and more relevant to a specific mandate than a seed round from 18 months ago.

An award announcement without a disbursement or completion date may be from a program the company dropped. Look for stage-gate language or a progress report, not just the initial announcement.

Transferable rule: A NEDO or SBIR stage-gate completion is external validation that the company met a technical and commercial bar, not just a self-reported milestone.

How to score the checklist

The checklist is a binary filter, not a scoring rubric. Two or more current signals within 12 months, with a date you can verify, means the company is worth outreach. One signal is a judgment call, usually worth a quick LinkedIn search to see whether the founding team is still visibly associated. Zero signals is a pass, or a note to revisit in six months.

A rough comparison of methods:

The manual check works and every corporate dev team should know it. The problem is scale: running it on 40 targets from a directory takes two days of analyst time, and most teams either skip it or compress it into a surface-level Google search.

Common mistakes that waste outreach budget

Treating database presence as activity proof. Crunchbase, PitchBook, and most regional directories update on a lag. A company can have a full profile, recent funding listed, and no one answering the phone. The 5-signal check exists because these sources are not activity monitors.

Checking the wrong time window. Twelve months is the floor for meaningful signals in most mandates; 18 to 24 months if you are in a slow-moving industrial sector. A hiring spike from two years ago followed by silence is a red flag, not a green one.

Skipping non-English sources. For targets in Japan, South Korea, or Eastern Europe, the most current signals are often in local trade press, government program registries, or LinkedIn posts in the local language. Auto-translation is imperfect but better than missing the signal entirely. Our piece on sourcing from Kraków's manufacturing ecosystem covers where to look in Eastern European industrial press specifically.

Confusing a press release with a customer. A partnership announcement is not a customer. A signed LOI is not revenue. Look for language that implies delivery: "deployed at," "in commercial operation," "second order placed."

For teams building a broader pre-outreach process, the startup due diligence checklist on this blog covers the next layer of checks once activity is confirmed.

FAQ

How do you tell if a startup is still active with no public data?

LinkedIn team page activity, recent posts from the founders or key employees, and whether the company appears in any government program database are the most reliable indicators when a company has minimal public footprint. If none of those return anything current, a brief direct inquiry framed as market research, not acquisition interest, is often the fastest way to get a live signal.

How many of the 5 signals do you need before reaching out?

Two current signals, each dated within the last 12 months, is a reasonable threshold for most mandates. One signal may be enough if it is particularly strong, such as a named enterprise pilot or a government stage-gate completion. Zero signals should be a hard pass until something changes.

Can you vet startup activity signals for international targets the same way?

The signal types are universal; the sources differ by country. Japan uses J-PlatPat for IP and NEDO program databases for grant milestones. South Korea uses DART for corporate disclosures and KIPRIS for patents. Eastern European companies active in EU-funded programs appear in the EU's CORDIS grant database. Hiring signals on LinkedIn translate reasonably well across markets, though local job platforms like Wantedly in Japan and Jumpit in Korea sometimes carry more current postings.

What is the difference between activity signals and due diligence?

Activity signals answer one question: is this company still operating and moving forward? Due diligence answers a different set of questions: is the technology defensible, is the team capable, are the financials sound, are there legal encumbrances? The 5-signal check is a pre-filter that runs in 20 minutes and saves you from spending diligence resources on dormant targets.

How often should corporate teams re-run activity checks on a watchlist?

Quarterly is a practical cadence for a watchlist of 20 to 40 targets. Markets move: a company that was dormant six months ago may have closed a grant round or launched a commercial pilot since then. Signals decay in the opposite direction too. A company that looked active a year ago may have gone quiet, which is equally useful to know before a scheduled outreach attempt.

If you want a short list where the activity check is already done, describe your mandate at chibit.io/scout and see what comes back.