Contact Search API

Search any contact, at any company

Get their full profile

Input type

You Input

curl --request POST \
  --url https://api.waterfall.io/v1/search/contact \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --header 'x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY' \
  --data '{
  "domain": "acme.com",
  "title_filters": [
    { "name": "founders", "filter": "founder OR co-founder OR ceo" }
  ],
  "page_number": 1,
  "page_size": 10
}'

Your Receive

{
  "status": "SUCCEEDED",
  "output": {
    "persons": [
      {
        "first_name": "Jane",
        "last_name": "Doe",
        "linkedin_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/jane-doe-abc123/",
        "title": "Head of Sales",
        "seniority": "Director",
        "department": "Sales",
        "company_name": "Acme Corp",
        "company_domain": "acme.com",
        "location": "San Francisco, California, United States"
      }
    ]
  }
}

You Input

curl --request POST \
  --url https://api.waterfall.io/v1/search/contact \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --header 'x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY' \
  --data '{
  "company_linkedin": "acme-corp",
  "title_filters": [
    { "name": "revops", "filter": "revenue operations OR sales ops" }
  ],
  "page_number": 1,
  "page_size": 25
}'

Your Receive

{
  "status": "SUCCEEDED",
  "output": {
    "persons": [
      {
        "first_name": "Sam",
        "last_name": "Patel",
        "linkedin_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-patel-9f2a/",
        "title": "Director, Revenue Operations",
        "seniority": "Director",
        "department": "Sales",
        "company_name": "Acme Corp",
        "company_linkedin_id": "acme-corp"
      }
    ]
  }
}

You Input

curl --request POST \
  --url https://api.waterfall.io/v1/search/contact \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --header 'x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY' \
  --data '{
  "domain": "acme.com",
  "contact_full_name": "Jane Doe",
  "page_number": 1,
  "page_size": 10
}'

Your Receive

{
  "status": "SUCCEEDED",
  "output": {
    "persons": [
      {
        "first_name": "Jane",
        "last_name": "Doe",
        "linkedin_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/jane-doe-abc123/",
        "title": "Head of Sales",
        "seniority": "Director",
        "department": "Sales",
        "company_name": "Acme Corp",
        "company_domain": "acme.com"
      }
    ]
  }
}

The core job

How to turn a personal email address into a business profile

Send the address you already have to a resolution API rather than matching it against a static database. Contact Search accepts a personal email — Gmail, Outlook, or any consumer domain — and returns the person behind it: current company, job title, seniority, LinkedIn profile and a verified work email. That single step is what turns an anonymous self-serve signup into a lead you can route, score and assign.

Start from whatever identifier you actually have

Coverage

Most search tools require the one identifier they happen to index, which is rarely the one sitting in your record. Contact Search resolves from a personal email, a professional email, a social profile URL, or a name plus domain — whichever your row contains. The hardest and most common case is the personal address left behind by a self-serve signup, and it is the case this endpoint was built for.

Resolved against live sources, then verified

Accuracy

A match is only useful if the person is still where the record says they are. Search runs against live sources rather than a periodic snapshot, and any email returned is verified before delivery — so a resolved profile is one you can route, score and write back to the CRM without a second check.

Pay Only for Matching Profiles

Pricing

We offer outcome-based pricing — Waterfall deducts credits only when we return a matching profile, even though we incur costs querying our vendors on every request. Searches that come back empty are free, and one credit covers the whole waterfall however many sources it takes to resolve the identifier you sent.

Customers

Hear what our customers say about us

Stop comparing vendors on their numbers. Run the benchmark on yours.

Three commercial reasons to start

Flexible Commercials
Best International Coverage
High Data Accuracy

Three technical reasons to start

One single API
Unified Response & Request structure
Sync & Async solution

Visit our API Documentation

Four jobs that start with an identifier you cannot use yet

Signup routing and lead scoring

Self-serve signups arrive as personal Gmail and Outlook addresses with no company attached. Resolve them to a company, title and seniority and routing, scoring and territory assignment become possible at all — rather than everyone landing in the same unqualified bucket.

Reverse lookup on unknown senders

A form fill or a reply arrives from an address nobody recognises. Resolve it to a person, a title and a company before a rep spends time qualifying it by hand.

Gap-filling on partial records

Rows that arrived from an event list, a legacy import or an acquisition often carry one usable field and nothing else. Search resolves from whichever identifier survived, rather than requiring the one you no longer have.

Identity resolution for AI agents

An agent cannot reason about an account until it knows who it is looking at. One call, one schema, whatever identifier the workflow happens to hold — and a deterministic answer rather than a guess the model has to defend.

FAQ

How is Contact Search priced?

Outcome-based. A credit is deducted only when we return a matching profile — an empty search is free — and one credit covers the whole waterfall regardless of how many sources it took to resolve the identifier. Rates depend on committed volume and are quoted against your own data rather than a list price.

What can I search by?

A social profile URL, a name plus domain, or an email — business or personal. Most tools require the identifier they happen to index; the point of a search layer is that you use whichever one your record actually contains.

Can you resolve a personal email to a business profile?

Yes, and it is one of the most common reasons teams use this endpoint. Self-serve signups arrive with personal addresses; resolving those to a company, a title and a seniority is what makes PLG routing and scoring possible at all. Send us 5,000 recent signups and we will show you how many of them we can place, on your data rather than a sample of ours.

Is search the same thing as enrichment?

Related, but not the same. Enrichment starts from a known person and fills in missing fields. Search starts from a partial identifier and finds the person first. Most teams use both: search to establish who this is, enrichment to complete the record once it is resolved.

Which personal email domains can you resolve?

Any consumer domain, not a fixed allow-list — Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud, GMX, Proton and regional providers all resolve the same way. Resolution rate is not uniform across them, and it is lower where the person has kept no public professional footprint tied to that address. We would rather you measure that on your own signups than take a headline number from us.

Book a call to hear more

Every company has different needs. Talk to our team (most likely one of the founders) to share your use case and see how Waterfall can help.