Chemicals on apis.io indexes 110 providers but only 42 APIs. Eighty-eight of the 110 list no API at all. No provider scores developing or above: the cohort is 5 thin, 24 emerging, 80 minimal, and one unscored.
The industry page defines chemicals broadly. It covers the producers and the coatings and polymers makers, and also the process-engineering, formulation, SDS-compliance and sourcing software sold into them. That second group is the one publishing APIs.
The cohort by function
| Function | Providers (Kin Score, APIs) |
|---|---|
| R&D and lab informatics | Uncountable 36.6 (2) |
| Marketplace and sourcing | Knowde 35.4 (2) |
| SDS and compliance | Chemius 33.1 (7), SafetyDataSheetAPI 18.4 (1) |
| Process engineering | AspenTech 31.4 (6) |
| Industrial gases and pigments | Air Products 26.7 (1), Tronox 25.9 (1) |
| Coatings | Sherwin-Williams 23.7 (2) |
| Commodity producers | Dow 15.7 (0), Westlake 10.6 (0), Albemarle 10.0 (0), DuPont 2.6 (0) |
What the table says
All four of the top scores belong to software vendors. Uncountable, Knowde, Chemius and AspenTech sit above every company that makes a chemical. Air Products, an industrial gas producer, is the highest-scoring manufacturer at 26.7, and it has a single API.
The large producers publish nothing the catalog can index. Dow, Westlake, Albemarle, Eastman, Celanese, Huntsman, LyondellBasell, PPG, DuPont and Chemours all list zero APIs, and all of them except Dow score minimal. Chemours scores 0.2. Their scores come from what their websites reveal, not from contracts. Selling chemicals happens over EDI, distributor portals and sales reps, and none of that shows up as a public developer surface.
The safety data sheet is the API this industry does have. Chemius publishes seven APIs, the most in the cohort: SDS, TDS, labels, ADR, PDF, ERP and web shop. SafetyDataSheetAPI turns SDS PDFs into structured data. The regulated document every chemical ships with is the one thing third-party vendors have made programmable. The producers that author those sheets have not.
Some of the roster no longer exists as described. Ferro and Valspar are described in their own entries in the past tense, as companies that were acquired. Both remain in the cohort and count toward the 110. Tag-computed membership keeps a company after it stops trading under that name.
Where to start
- SDS and label automation: Chemius, then SafetyDataSheetAPI for extraction.
- Formulation and R&D data: Uncountable.
- Process simulation and optimization: AspenTech’s six APIs.
- Neighbouring cohorts: industrial and energy.
Takeaway
Chemicals is a 110-company industry with a 42-API catalog, and almost all of those APIs come from the software layer. If you need programmatic access to a producer, assume it does not exist publicly and plan on a vendor in between. See the cohort at apis.io/industries/chemicals/.