Map the Entire Economy with Beauhurst

Our new industry classification system is now live on the platform, classifying 4.6m companies (and counting).

Our new industry classification system is now live on Beauhurst. With this update, we’re enabling our subscribers to search across the entire UK economy, with 225 industries and 4.6m companies classified (and counting). In fact, we now deliver over 70x the coverage compared to before.

So, whether you’re trying to understand your total addressable market, or find the full list of companies that work within a particular niche sector, you’ve come to the right place. Here’s everything you need to know about the Beauhurst industry matrix.

This new industry-leading classification system has been 14 years in the making. For over a decade, our expert data curators have manually classified and tagged UK companies on our platform, and we became known for tracking the private company economy.

Then, we challenged ourselves to apply the same level of accuracy across the entire economy. Now, we’ve combined the best of both worlds, blending the expertise of our human data curators with machine learning that’s trained on their decisions. This means our industry classifications are the best in the market for both coverage and accuracy.

So long SIC codes

Anyone in the business of company data knows that SIC codes (standard industrial classifications), while historically useful, are a bit, well, dated. Their inflexibility means that it’s impossible to track companies beyond traditional sectors.

Simply put, they’re too broad. Take SaaS companies, for example. SIC codes lump SaaS, app development, and server software all under a single umbrella term: Software Development (62012). For most of us, that’s not particularly helpful.

That’s why we launched our own company classification system over a decade ago. For years, our subscribers have tracked the evolving economy using what we called ‘sectors’—and to great success. But naturally, our product team is always working hard behind the scenes to make improvements.

And so a new industry classification system was created and launched to cover the entire UK economy. From deep tech pioneers to the shops and cafes on your local high street.

Take this renewables company, for example. It’s gone from this:

To this:

Here, you can immediately get a clearer understanding of what the company does. Replacing ‘other telecommunications services’ with ‘telecommunication infrastructure,’ and ‘clean energy generation’ for ‘renewable energy’ and ‘environmental consultancy.’

Track the entire UK economy

To put the scope of the industries update into perspective, you simply need to look at the data (our favourite thing to do).

Our cutting-edge machine learning models, combined with our years of industry expertise and high-quality starting dataset, have enabled us to expand our industry coverage over the whole UK.

Over 4.6m companies are now categorised with 225 industry classifications and 80 buzzwords; a massive 70x increase on the 70k companies previously. By expanding our classifications, Beauhurst company data now reflects the whole economy as it is in 2024, resulting in a dataset unique in its scale and accuracy.

Get the most from our industry classifications

Spot new opportunities
Discover and understand opportunities in every corner of the economy before your competitors, thanks to our full coverage of the UK economy. Beauhurst industries classifications are already helping our clients spot companies and trends that others might miss.

Rapid, efficient searching
The brand-new industries matrix is an extensive and standardised classification system, enabling you to easily find what you’re looking for — without needing to know complex industry jargon. Simply search over every UK business from a single drop-down menu.

Understand companies in seconds
Quickly understand what area a company operates in to help you tailor your outreach strategy, with unparalleled precision and personalisation.

So, how does it work?

Our new industry tags are visible at the top of the company profile page, right where our previous sectors were.

To find companies using our industries, head to the Advanced Search tool on the Beauhurst platform, and add new criteria. Search for ‘industries and buzzwords’, and you’ll be greeted with a box of our new industries, ordered alphabetically. Here, you can scroll through and find every UK industry.

Looking for something specific? You can search for specific industries to include. Here, we’ll use renewable energy, telecoms infrastructure, and environmental consultancy.

But we’d also like to find private companies in those industries that have been spun out from a university to see which higher education institutions are producing companies in these industries.

To do this, we’ll refine our results by choosing to only include companies that have spun out of an academic institution.

This very simple search drills down from 4.6m companies to 62, demonstrating the level of precision the new industries feature can offer.

For more information on how the latest update works, Anna, our very own Head of Subscriber Growth, has created a walk-through video. Check it out below.

And for those who are more reading-inclined, we’ve also produced a fully written guide, which includes a how-to on transferring your company collections from sectors to industries.