INSEE Sirene MCP server: connect AI agents to the French business register from the EU

Sirene is the interministerial register of French companies and establishments, maintained by INSEE, the national statistics institute in Montrouge. It lists every legal unit by SIREN and every establishment by SIRET since 1973, with name, activity code, address, headcount band and status, and is free to reuse.

The open-source insee-mcp server, written in TypeScript and run with Docker over stdio, exposes the Sirene API together with INSEE's metadata and BDM time series APIs. It is a community project and not published by INSEE.

A finance team can check every new supplier before the first payment: does the SIRET exist, is the establishment active, and does the address match the invoice? A sales team can enrich a list of prospects with NAF codes, headcount bands and head office addresses, then segment it by region.

Analysts can combine company counts with official statistics, for example the number of active establishments in a NAF sub-class per département next to the unemployment rate from the BDM series. Succession links help clean old records after a company moved.

No key is needed to start. Without one, the server uses INSEE's public open data plan, which allows 30 requests per minute. On inference.eu, add the INSEE Sirene connector to an agent, and the tools are available straight away.

For higher volumes, create an application on the INSEE API portal and add its key to the connector; the server sends it in the X-INSEE-Api-Key-Integration header. The key is stored encrypted in the EU and only reaches the agents you allow.

The server sends SIREN, SIRET numbers and search criteria to the INSEE API operated by the French administration, and nothing else. Sirene is public data, but some sole traders have asked for their details to be partly hidden, and the API respects that choice.

On inference.eu, the model that reads the results runs in EU data centres, and any API key you add is stored encrypted in the EU. When you enrich customer or supplier lists, keep the use within the purpose for which you hold those lists.

All tools read public data, so the agent cannot change anything in Sirene. The main points to watch are rate limits and correctness: an agent that loops through thousands of SIRET numbers will hit the 30-requests-per-minute limit of the public plan.

Ask agents to report the SIRET and the update date for each fact, and spot-check results before they go into your ERP. On inference.eu you can require a person to approve calls in other connectors that write enriched data back into your CRM or accounting system.