WireScreen is a risk intelligence platform built to map and decode China's global business networks. We maintain one of the world's most comprehensive Chinese corporate datasets — over 20 million companies and 37 million executives and individuals. Using those records, we reveal hidden ownership, affiliations, and risks that others miss — enabling our customers to make confident, informed decisions in complex, high-stakes environments.
Our journey at WireScreen took root as our co-founder, David Barboza, was uncovering deep-seated corruption within China’s ‘princeling’ networks during his tenure as a Shanghai correspondent at The New York Times.
In his pursuit of truth, David spent 1.5 years sourcing, collating, and interpreting thousands of corporate records by hand. Armed with this meticulously gathered information, he uncovered an intricate web of connections exploited by China’s ruling elite to accumulate massive amounts of wealth.
This relentless investigation earned him the coveted Pulitzer Prize.
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But his work also sparked an idea: What if we could build a new type of data analytics platform that employs software to shine deeper insights on how companies do business globally? Never again would anyone need to manually collect and combine corporate data.
Our mission: To equip businesses, regulators, and consumers with unparalleled insights. Greater corporate transparency is on the horizon!
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WireScreen was founded in 2019. It is a division of The Wire Digital Inc., a news and data startup based in New York City. Its affiliated company is The Wire China, a weekly digital magazine.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who previously worked at The New York Times, David has more than 15 years of experience covering China and using corporate records.
A former financier who worked in private equity, Lynn has spent more than a decade analyzing corporate data. She studied chemistry and finance in China and Japan.
An experienced revenue leader, Brad has built teams serving sophisticated clients at FactSet and Factor Law. He studied Political Science, Philosophy, and Economics at UPenn.
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Alex has successfully built technical organizations and scaled complex backend infrastructure at Reonomy and Baton. He studied Computer Science with a specialization in Software Systems at Columbia University.
We are fortunate to work with some of the leading venture capital firms.
WireScreen is a risk intelligence platform that maps the ownership, investments, and hidden relationships behind Chinese companies — and, increasingly, corporate power worldwide. We assemble hard-to-access primary sources and turn them into clear answers about who really controls a company and what risk it carries. We're the definitive map for anyone who needs to understand the networks that shape global commerce and national security.
We serve people who can't afford to be wrong about who they're dealing with: Western and allied governments, including the U.S. government, plus multinationals, financial services firms, law and consulting firms. What they share is the need to see through complexity and obfuscation that ordinary databases miss. When the stakes are real, these are the teams that come to us.
Our customers are making hard decisions about risk — vetting the partners, suppliers, customers, and investors on the other side of those decisions. We answer the question that actually matters — who is this entity, and what risk does it carry — with confidence and speed. We also help with supply chain and procurement risk. Work that used to take an analyst weeks, like tracing beneficial owners or surfacing military, national security, and forced-labor ties, now takes minutes.
We go deeper on Chinese corporate structures than anyone, and our edge is risk that propagates: when a tie to the military, sanctions, or forced labor exists, we follow it through investments, locations, leadership, and customers. Most tools were built for transparent, financial use cases — we were built for opaque, adversarial ones, which is a different and much harder problem. Raw data is a commodity; the intelligence we build on top of it, and the trust we've earned with the agencies writing the rules, is the moat.
We started with China because it's the hardest case on earth — if you can read deliberate opacity at that scale, you can read it anywhere. China isn't the ceiling, it's the proving ground; the destination is a global map of cross-border corporate power. We're making global power legible. Our research team applies judgment, validates findings, and stands behind the output. Every connection in WireScreen is traceable to a source, not a model's confidence score.
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