Why We're Building Vigil
The warning signs that a company is in trouble are sitting in plain sight on Companies House. The problem isn't access to the data. It's that the data tells you nothing on its own.
Every company that went bust owing money to someone had warning signs. Director resignations filed weeks earlier. Charges registered against assets. Accounts filed months late or not at all. A Gazette notice nobody read because nobody was watching.
The data is public. It's been public for years. That's not the problem.
The problem is that Companies House tells you what happened and nothing else. A filing appears and you get an email that says "a document was filed for [Company Name]." No description of what was filed. No explanation of what it means. No indication of whether you should care.
So most people stop reading the emails. And the warning signs pile up, unread, until it's too late.
The product this market is missing
Every existing tool in this space has been built the same way: surface the data, stop there. The enterprise products (Creditsafe, DueDil, Experian Business) give you a risk score without explaining what drove it. The cheaper tools are RSS feeds with a website bolted on. Users consistently report the same complaint about all of them: they give you data but they don't tell you what to do with it.
We think that's the wrong product.
A credit controller doesn't want to know that a director resigned. They want to know whether that resignation is a red flag or routine. They don't want to see a list of registered charges — they want to know whether the pattern looks like a lender taking standard security or a company being stripped before dissolution.
Vigil is built around that difference. Every alert includes a plain English interpretation of what the filing means, contextualised against companies of similar size and sector. We're not trying to replace the data. We're trying to make it readable.
What we're building first
The core product is a company watchlist with real-time monitoring of Companies House filings and London Gazette notices. When something significant changes at a company you're tracking, you find out the same day, with enough context to know whether it matters.
Two features in particular are worth explaining because they don't exist anywhere at the price point we're targeting.
The first is Gazette integration. When a company enters voluntary dissolution, a notice is published in the London Gazette two months before the striking-off becomes final. During that window, creditors can object and protect their right to pursue the debt. The vast majority of creditors never see the notice. They find out the company is gone after the window has closed. Vigil monitors Gazette notices for every company on your watchlist and alerts you the same day one appears — with the objection deadline and the process explained in plain terms.
The second is director intelligence. Most monitoring tools watch companies. Companies House data lets you monitor the people who run a company, not just the company itself. A director who joins three companies in a year, or resigns from two of them in the same week, is a signal that doesn't attach cleanly to any single company. When a director you're tracking incorporates a new company within months of one they were associated with dissolving, that's the phoenix pattern — a common way to leave debts behind with a clean slate. We surface it.
The goal across all of this is to get from "a document was filed" to "here's what it means and what you might want to do about it."
Who we're building it for
Credit controllers who extend terms to customers they've never formally vetted. Accountants who want to monitor counterparty risk on behalf of clients. Solicitors running a deal who need to know if anything changes at the counterparty before exchange. Freelancers who've been burned by a client that disappeared mid-project and want to check the next one before they start.
The common thread: people who know the warning signs exist but don't have a practical way to catch them in time.
Existing tools price this as an enterprise problem — £2,000–10,000 a year, annual contracts, a sales call before you can sign up. We're building it for SMBs, at SMB pricing, with self-serve access from day one.
Where we are now
We're in early development, talking to as many potential users as we can before we write more code than we need to.
If you're a credit controller, accountant, commercial solicitor, B2B sales manager, or anyone else who monitors companies as part of your work — we'd genuinely like to hear from you. Not a pitch, just a conversation. What tools are you using now? What's missing? What would an alert from a tool like this need to tell you for it to actually change what you do?
If you'd rather just follow along, you can join the early access waitlist and we'll let you know when the first version is ready.
Join the waitlist or get in touch if you have questions.