What is “SARL”?
SARL stands for Société à Responsabilité Limitée (French), a private limited liability company used primarily in Angola, Burkina Faso, Switzerland. The suffix signals that the business has limited liability and is privately held.
Full meaning & translation
The full form is Société à Responsabilité Limitée, a French-language term. It translates literally as “Company with limited liability.” You may also encounter it abbreviated or written as sa rl, societe a responsabilite limitee, srl.
Where it's used
SARL appears in company names registered in the following 5 jurisdictions:
What it tells you about the company
Equivalent forms around the world
These are the closest structural equivalents to SARL in other jurisdictions — same entity category, different national law.
Normalizing “SARL” in your data
When matching or deduplicating company records, the legal suffix is noise — “Acme SARL” 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 SARL", "country": "ao"}'{
"data": {
"canonical": "acme sarl",
"legal_type": null,
"tokens": [
"acme",
"sarl"
]
},
"meta": {
"pipeline": [
"lowercase",
"legal_suffix"
],
"confidence": 0.99
}
}Compare SARL with
Frequently asked questions
What does SARL stand for?
SARL stands for Société à Responsabilité Limitée (French), which translates as "Company with limited liability".
Is a SARL public or private?
A SARL is a private entity — its shares are not publicly listed or traded on a stock exchange.
What is the liability in a SARL?
Owners of a SARL have limited liability. Their personal assets are protected, and their exposure is capped at the amount they invested.
Which countries use SARL?
SARL is used in Angola, Burkina Faso, Switzerland, Italy and 1 other country.
Is a SARL 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 SARL at scale? The Ambect API handles it across 100+ countries in under 5 ms.
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