A couple of years ago, I stumbled into one of the most unglamorous corners of business data: German insolvency filings.
It started with a simple observation. Every day, hundreds of German companies file for insolvency. Courts publish these filings publicly — but the data is scattered
across clunky government portals that feel like they were designed in 2003. No alerts, no filtering, no way to actually use the information.
For anyone working in procurement, legal, or competitive intelligence, this is a problem. If your biggest supplier goes bankrupt and you find out two weeks late from
a newspaper article, that’s a problem you could have avoided.
So I built https://insolvenztracker.de.
The idea was straightforward: aggregate all insolvency filings from German courts in real-time, make them searchable, and let users set up watchlists with instant
email alerts. No more manually checking government websites. No more surprises.
It resonated. Procurement teams started using it to monitor suppliers. Law firms used it to find new mandates. Competitors used it to spot acquisition opportunities
before anyone else.
Once the core data pipeline was running, the international angle became obvious. Foreign investors and companies with German exposure had the same problem — except
they couldn’t even read the German court portals. That’s why I launched https://germanyinsolvencies.com, an English-language version of the same platform tailored to
international users.
But the more I worked with insolvency data, the more I noticed a gap on the other side of the table. There was no good, centralized database of the insolvency
administrators themselves — the lawyers and firms actually managing these proceedings.
If you wanted to find out which administrator handles the most cases in Bavaria, or which firm specializes in manufacturing insolvencies, or simply get contact
details for a specific Insolvenzverwalter — good luck. That information existed nowhere in a structured, searchable format.
So I built https://insolvenzverwalterdatenbank.de.
It’s a comprehensive database of every insolvency administrator in Germany: their complete case histories, firm affiliations, contact details, regional focus, and
industry breakdown. Over 2,300 administrators, 900+ firms, and tens of thousands of proceedings — all searchable and filterable.
The three products complement each other naturally. InsolvenzTracker and GermanyInsolvencies answer “what’s happening” — which companies are going insolvent, right
now. InsolvenzverwalterDatenbank answers “who’s handling it” — which administrators and firms are running the show.
What I find interesting about this space is how much valuable public data simply sits unused because nobody has bothered to make it accessible. The German court
system publishes everything. It’s all there. It just needs someone to collect it, structure it, and build an interface that doesn’t make you want to close your
browser.
That’s really the whole thesis: take publicly available data that matters to professionals, and make it actually usable.
