Finding all companies in a sector is hard...
Unless you're searching for a well established industry (like Manufacturing, or Software), chances are there won't exist a sector classification that perfectly matches your desired definition.
This gets even harder if you want to find companies in a niche subsector, such as:
Cancer Diagnosis, within Clinical Diagnostics
Injection Moulding, within Manufacturing
Hydrogen-fuel cells, within Energy Storage
Or what if you want to be even more specific, and need to find companies developing any of the following:
Cuff-less blood-pressure devices
Soil acidity monitors to improve crop yield
Computer hardware which is actively resilient to cyber attacks
Needless to say, a SIC code doesn't exist for any of these subsectors.
How Beauhurst solves this problem
Finding comprehensive lists of all companies in a given niche area can be achieved with a number of our datasets and search features. Finding the perfect list of companies will often require running multiple versions of these searches and combining each list into a Collection. These options are highlighted in the following video and summarised below, including links to our walkthrough pages to use these yourself:
Industries and Buzzwords:
Best for mapping an entire sector
Our Industries and Buzzwords are a new comprehensive classification to replace SIC codes.
Industries and Buzzwords are tagged for over 1.5m UK companies
Companies are tagged based on a combination of manual curation and machine learning algorithms which we trained using our historic database of 50,000 'tracked' business.
Companies are tagged with as many industries as are relevant, meaning you can search for companies in the overlap of two areas, or exclude overlaps you're not interested in (more examples below!)
➡️ See our industries walkthrough here
Description keywords:
Best for finding companies with certain offerings, products, or specialisms
We generate descriptions for over 1.5m companies through a combination of manual curation and website scraping
All descriptions are searchable, helping you isolate specific offerings like 'training for developers' or 'manufactures white goods'.
You can search for a list of keywords, or certain phrases, depending on how specific you want to be.
➡️ See our description walkthrough here
Similar Description Finder:
Best for identifying similar businesses and immediate competitors to an example company
Using the same descriptions which we pull from company websites, our Similar Description Algorithm returns a lists of similar businesses based on a single example company.
You can interact with this via the 'Similar companies' tab on company pages, and via our Advanced Search.
Use this when you want to find closely similar businesses to a given example, but you're not too concerned about matching based on an exact word or industry.
➡️ See our similar description walkthrough here
Innovate UK Grant Search:
Best for the most niche searches possible - finding innovative companies developing certain technologies/utilising scientific methods in their activity
Through our partnership with Innovate UK we pull through all project grants secured by UK companies.
With this dataset, you can search over the project titles or abstracts for mentions of specific technologies, innovations, pharmaceuticals, diseases, and more!
Use this when you want to find companies with ultra-specialised innovations that might not appear in their top-level website description
E.g. use this when you want to find 'Cuff-less blood-pressure monitors' within a broader 'Medical Devices' industry.
➡️ See our InnovateUK Grant walkthrough here