Enrich People by Email

This endpoint allows you to look up a person using their email address and retrieve their professional profile data. Including their name, job title, company, location, and LinkedIn URL.

What this endpoint does:

This endpoint lets you submit one or more email addresses to Surfe and receive back enriched professional profile information for each person.

When available, returned data can include:

• firstName and lastName

• companyName and companyDomain

• jobTitle

• country

• linkedInUrl

• jobHistory

Common use cases include:

1. Inbound lead enrichment: Turn a raw email address into a fully qualified contact.

2. CRM and database cleaning: Fill in missing attributes across large contact databases and reduce duplicates.

3. Personalised outbound: Reverse-lookup email lists to find LinkedIn profiles and seniority data for more targeted outreach.

4. Customer identification: Surface a contact's role and company instantly when an inbound email arrives.

5. Product-led growth tracking: Enrich sign-up emails to identify high-value accounts early and trigger a sales handoff.

Endpoint overview

HTTP Method

POST

Endpoint URL

https://api.surfe.com/v2/people/find-by-email

Authentication

Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY

All Surfe API requests must include your API key in the request header. To generate your API key please find the article here.
​

Before you start

Before using this endpoint, make sure you have the following in place.

1. A Surfe account

You must have an active Surfe account to use the API.

2. API access

Generate your API key from Settings → API Settings inside your Surfe account.

3. Sufficient credits

This endpoint uses search credits — not email or mobile credits
Costs 10 search credits per successful match. Credits are locked at request time and refunded if no match is found.

4. A tool to send requests

Here are a few options as examples you can use to send API requests:

• Postman

• Zapier

• Make

• n8n

• A custom backend integration

How this endpoint works

This enrichment runs asynchronously, meaning you submit your request and receive an ID immediately, rather than waiting for results in the same response.

There are two steps:

1. Start the enrichment — send your POST request and receive an enrichmentID

2. Retrieve the results — either use a webhook (recommended) to receive results automatically when completed, or poll a second GET endpoint using the enrichmentID

Recommended: Use a webhookUrl in your initial request. This avoids the need to poll and is more efficient.

Step 1: Start the enrichment

Request structure

Send a POST request with a JSON body containing the email address(es) you want to enrich.
​

Required headers

Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY 
Content-Type: application/json

Request body example:
​

{
  "notificationOptions": {
    "webhookUrl": "https://your-webhook-url.com/endpoint"
  },
  "people": [
    {
      "email": "david.chevalier@surfe.com",
      "externalID": "external-id"
    }
  ]
}

Request field definitions
​

cURL example
​

curl -X POST "https://api.surfe.com/v2/people/find-by-email" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "notificationOptions": {
      "webhookUrl": ""
    },
    "people": [
      {
        "email": "david.chevalier@surfe.com",
        "externalID": "external-id"
      }
    ]
  }'

Example response
​

{
"enrichmentID": "ed851fb5-20e4-4483-b794-c63931056787",
"enrichmentCallbackURL": "https://api.surfe.com/v2/people/enrich/ed851fb5-20e4-4483-b794-c63931056787"
}

This response confirms your enrichment has been queued. Save the `enrichmentID` — you'll need it to retrieve results if you're not using webhooks.
​

Step 2: Retrieve the results
 

Option A: Webhooks (recommended) 
If you included a `webhookUrl` in your request, Surfe will automatically send the enrichment results to that URL once processing is complete. No further action is needed on your end. See the webhooks documentation here.

Option B: Poll for results 
If you're not using webhooks, you can retrieve results manually using the Enrich People (get) endpoint.

HTTP Method

GET

Endpoint URL

https://api.surfe.com/v2/people/enrich/<your-enrichment-id>

Authentication

Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY

Replace <your-enrichment-id> with the enrichmentID from Step 1.

cURL Example:

curl -X GET "https://api.surfe.com/v2/people/enrich/ed851fb5-20e4-4483-b794-c63931056787" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"

Note: Polling is less efficient than webhooks and may introduce delays. If polling, check approximately once per second until the status changes from IN_PROGRESS to COMPLETED.

Example response
​

{
    "enrichmentID": "ed851fb5-20e4-4483-b794-c63931056787",
    "percentCompleted": 100,
    "people": [
        {
            "companyDomain": "surfe.com",
            "companyName": "Surfe",
            "country": "DE",
            "firstName": "David",
            "jobHistory": [
                {
                    "companyName": "Surfe",
                    "jobTitle": "Co-Founder & CEO",
                    "linkedInURL": "https://linkedin.com/company/surfe",
                    "startDate": "2020-03-01T00:00:00Z"
                },
            ],
            "jobTitle": "Co-Founder & CEO",
            "lastName": "Chevalier",
            "linkedInUrl": "https://linkedin.com/in/david-maurice-chevalier-84607875",
            "status": "COMPLETED"
        }
    ],
    "status": "COMPLETED"
}

Response fields explained

Best practices

• Use webhooks instead of polling wherever possible. It's faster and reduces unnecessary load.

• Include an externalID with each person so you can easily match results back to your own records.

• Validate email formats before submitting to avoid wasted requests.

• Handle errors gracefully, build logic in your integration to deal with errors.

• Log API responses for debugging and auditing purposes.

• Respect rate limits, add delays or queuing if you're sending large volumes.
  
  Additional Resources

• Surfe API Documentation

• Webhooks

• Find your API key

• Setting up the API

• Terms & Conditions of using our API

• Rate Limits

Need help?

If you need assistance:

• Reach out to the Surfe support team.

• Review the full Surfe API Documentation

• Ask your developer or RevOps team to assist with implementation