What is “GK”?
GK stands for Limited Liability Company, a private limited liability company used primarily in Japan, United States. The suffix signals that the business has limited liability and is privately held.
Full meaning & translation
The full form is Limited Liability Company. It translates literally as “limited liability company.” You may also encounter it abbreviated or written as gōdō gaisha, gōdō kaisha, limited liability co, limited liability company.
Where it's used
GK appears in company names registered in the following 2 jurisdictions:
What it tells you about the company
Equivalent forms around the world
These are the closest structural equivalents to GK in other jurisdictions — same entity category, different national law.
Normalizing “GK” in your data
When matching or deduplicating company records, the legal suffix is noise — “Acme GK” and “Acme” should resolve to the same entity. One API call strips it and returns a stable canonical form:
curl -X POST https://api.ambect.com/v1/normalize/company \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $AMBECT_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"name": "Acme GK", "country": "jp"}'{
"data": {
"canonical": "acme gk",
"legal_type": null,
"tokens": [
"acme",
"gk"
]
},
"meta": {
"pipeline": [
"lowercase",
"legal_suffix"
],
"confidence": 0.99
}
}Frequently asked questions
What does GK stand for?
GK stands for Limited Liability Company, which translates as "limited liability company".
Is a GK public or private?
A GK is a private entity — its shares are not publicly listed or traded on a stock exchange.
What is the liability in a GK?
Owners of a GK have limited liability. Their personal assets are protected, and their exposure is capped at the amount they invested.
Which countries use GK?
GK is used in Japan, United States.
Is a GK the same as a LLC?
Functionally comparable — both are private limited liability company forms — but they operate under different national laws with distinct formation, capital, and governance requirements.
Need to normalize GK at scale? The Ambect API handles it across 100+ countries in under 5 ms.
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