How To Find Similar Companies To Your Clients & Competitors

With the Beauhurst platform, you can discover every private company in the UK that’s hit at least one of our high-growth tracking triggers—from securing equity investment and innovation grants, to attending an accelerator programme or reaching scaleup status. What’s more, once you’ve found a high-growth business you’re interested in, our clever algorithm creates a whole list of similar companies for you to explore, based on their description. And now, we’ve made it even smarter! 

Every tracked business on the Beauhurst platform has a company description. Our Similar Companies algorithm uses machine learning and semantic search to analyse the meaning of these and to find other tracked companies with similar ones (even if they don’t include any of the same words).

We work hard to continuously improve the Beauhurst platform for our subscribers, listening carefully to their wants and needs. Following customer feedback, we’ve released two updates to our Advanced Search tool that incorporate the Similar Companies feature, previously only found on company profiles. So now, you can further refine and manipulate your searches to return relevant companies.

Discover similar companies for benchmarking and competitor monitoring

First things first, here’s a quick refresher on Advanced Search: it’s the section of the Beauhurst platform that allows you to search over all UK companies, using any combination of our criteria. These include a company’s financials, location, sector, fundraisings and investors, and hundreds more.

Now, you can include Similar Companies as a criterion in Advanced Search and combine it with other data points, to find ambitious businesses like those you already work with or have your eye on. This means you can easily prospect new leads in your target sector, keep track of your clients’ competitors (even the ones you haven’t heard of), and benchmark deals against the wider market.

Say you want to find the next Tessian, or even companies similar to Tessian that have also secured funding from Accel or attended a Tech Nation accelerator…this is how you’d do it. Within the company criteria of Advanced Search, simply select “Further details > Description is similar to”. Here, you can enter a company name and our algorithm will do all the heavy lifting for you, finding similar businesses that fit into your other search criteria.

You’ll be able to add the results to a Collection, to set up alerts or for easy monitoring at a later date. You can also explore where in the country similar companies are based, any recent transactions or news mentions, and more.

Explore emerging startup sectors

And if you don’t already have a specific client or prospect in mind to find similar companies for, that’s fine too! Our handy update means that you can create company descriptions of your own, to discover companies at the cutting edge of UK innovation that don’t fit into existing sectors or buzzwords.

Perhaps you’re looking for companies that develop “software for drug discovery”. Our intelligent description search means there’s no need to build complex combinations of sectors and keyword matches to achieve this. All you need to do is define your area of interest in the “Description is similar to > A description like” criteria, and our algorithm will understand the semantic meaning of your sentence. Then build up the rest of your search as usual, say spinout companies based in England, and take a look through the results.

Have an idea for a search already? Get exploring on the Beauhurst platform to try it out for yourself. Or, if you don’t have a subscription just yet, fill in the form below and one of our Associates will get in touch to show you around the platform.