sole proprietorshipunlimited liability

What is “ELU”?

ELU (registered individual entrepreneur or sole proprietorship) is a sole proprietorship used primarily in Switzerland. It signals unlimited liability and private ownership.

Where it's used

ELU appears in company names registered in the following jurisdiction:

CH · Switzerland

What it tells you about the company

LiabilityMembers have unlimited personal liability for the entity's obligations.
OwnershipPrivately held. Shares are not listed or traded on a public exchange.
ComparableBroadly equivalent to EIRL in France, EK in Germany, EU in Germany.

Equivalent forms around the world

These are the closest structural equivalents to ELU in other jurisdictions — same entity category, different national law.

CountryEquivalent suffix
FranceEIRL
GermanyEK
GermanyEU
United KingdomSP
United StatesDBA

Normalizing “ELU” in your data

When matching or deduplicating company records, the legal suffix is noise — Acme ELU” and “Acme” should resolve to the same entity. One API call strips it and returns a stable canonical form:

Request
curl -X POST https://api.ambect.com/v1/normalize/company \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AMBECT_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name": "Acme ELU", "country": "ch"}'
Response
{
  "data": {
    "canonical": "acme elu",
    "legal_type": null,
    "tokens": [
      "acme",
      "elu"
    ]
  },
  "meta": {
    "pipeline": [
      "lowercase",
      "legal_suffix"
    ],
    "confidence": 0.99
  }
}

Frequently asked questions

What does ELU mean?

ELU means "registered individual entrepreneur or sole proprietorship".

Is a ELU public or private?

A ELU is a private entity — its shares are not publicly listed or traded on a stock exchange.

What is the liability in a ELU?

Members of a ELU have unlimited personal liability — they can be held responsible for the entity's debts beyond their initial investment.

Which countries use ELU?

ELU is used in Switzerland.

Need to normalize ELU at scale? The Ambect API handles it across 100+ countries in under 5 ms.

Try the live normalizer free →