What is “VOF”?
VOF stands for vennootschap onder firma (Dutch), a general partnership used primarily in Netherlands. The suffix signals that the business has unlimited liability and is privately held.
Full meaning & translation
The full form is vennootschap onder firma, a Dutch-language term. It translates literally as “partnership under firm name.” You may also encounter it abbreviated or written as vennootschap onder firma.
Where it's used
VOF appears in company names registered in the following jurisdiction:
What it tells you about the company
Equivalent forms around the world
These are the closest structural equivalents to VOF in other jurisdictions — same entity category, different national law.
Normalizing “VOF” in your data
When matching or deduplicating company records, the legal suffix is noise — “Acme VOF” 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 VOF", "country": "nl"}'{
"data": {
"canonical": "acme vof",
"legal_type": null,
"tokens": [
"acme",
"vof"
]
},
"meta": {
"pipeline": [
"lowercase",
"legal_suffix"
],
"confidence": 0.99
}
}Frequently asked questions
What does VOF stand for?
VOF stands for vennootschap onder firma (Dutch), which translates as "partnership under firm name".
Is a VOF public or private?
A VOF is a private entity — its shares are not publicly listed or traded on a stock exchange.
What is the liability in a VOF?
Members of a VOF have unlimited personal liability — they can be held responsible for the entity's debts beyond their initial investment.
Which countries use VOF?
VOF is used in Netherlands.
Need to normalize VOF at scale? The Ambect API handles it across 100+ countries in under 5 ms.
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