From tech pioneers to the shops and cafes on your local high street, our new industries classification system covers 4.6m companies across the UK to help you discover and understand opportunities in every corner of the economy.
🔍 Search over industries

Anyone that has tried to use Companies House SIC codes to find companies that interest them will be painfully aware of its limitations, particularly when going beyond traditional sectors like agriculture, mining and manufacturing. That’s why, over a decade ago, we built a sector classification aimed to better cover emerging industries that were the focus of new investments, grants, innovation and growth as our dataset focused on this “high growth ecosystem”.

Our sectors have been a customer favourite since then but as we have expanded our dataset beyond the thousands of companies we class as “high growth” to all companies in the UK, we wanted to bridge the gap and create a modern industrial classification system that works for understanding the whole economy.

More descriptive

• We have rebuilt our classification from the ground up to better describe the domain a company operates in whatever they do, from Accountancies to Space Infrastructure to Weddings, and everything in between.
• Covering 225 industries in total across 14 major groups, we cover industries in more depth than our previous sector matrix.
• Companies can have multiple industries, allowing you to compose unique combinations to zero in on those most relevant to you. Combining the recruitment and care homes industries reveals over 2,000 active companies operating in this space. 🔍 Open this search

Larger scale

• Covering 4.6m companies, our industries classifier has 70 times the coverage of our previous sectors.
• This accounts for over 75% of economic activity reported at Companies House. Measured by reported turnover and employment of active companies.
• We combine the best of both worlds, blending tens of thousands of decisions from our expert curators enhanced with machine learning, achieving a dataset unique in its scale and accuracy.

Easier to use

• This release comes with a new selector in advanced search with groupings and filters to help you find the industry you are looking for.
• We have also integrated buzzwords into the same search criteria so it’s easy to include both in a single query.

Expanding buzzwords

Speaking of buzzwords, we have also taken this opportunity to expand them to over 50,000 companies (4x our existing coverage) and we have added 12 new buzzwords to help discover emerging trends such as artificial meat and biometrics and cross industry themes like ethical shopping.

You will find this new industry in all the familiar places in the platform across search, company pages, exports, charts and is coming soon to our API and integrations.