You've been able to run our preset lenses to get fast, structured insight on companies. Now you can build your own.

Custom lenses let you ask any company research question, get an AI-powered answer grounded in our data, and save the questions that matter most — so you can run the same research reliably, across every company you review.

How to use them

Ask a question, get an answer. Type any question about a company directly into the lens panel. Focus your prompts on an outcome, rather than a topic, to get the best reusable outputs.

Save and reuse as lenses. When a question is worth repeating, save it. We’ll name it for you automatically, though you can edit the name any time. Arrange your saved lenses in whatever order suits your workflow.

Work side by side with your data. Lenses now live in a persistent side panel, so you can run and review them without losing your place as you move through a company profile.

What you can do with custom lenses

Custom lenses are most powerful when you have a repeatable research need that our presets don’t cover. A few examples of what you might ask:

• Screening companies: “Does this company operate in financial services and have there been recent signs of growth?” — build a qualification lens that reflects your target companies.
• Due diligence: “Produce a focused SWOT analysis of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats for this company.” — save the DD questions your team asks every time.
• Strategic analysis: “What signs suggest this company might be family owned?” — apply a consistent lens across a category to spot patterns.

Until now, lenses gave you fast answers to our questions. Custom lenses put the research agenda in your hands, making it possible to encode your own questions directly into your workflow.

Every answer is grounded in our data, so you get the consistency of a reliable, structured process with the flexibility of asking open-ended questions.

Try it now

Lenses are powered by AI.

We are now analysing Person of Significant control filings to find the signal amongst the noise and identify acquisitions that never make the press. Only 15% of these filings represent true acquisitions and our team of expert data curators review every one to produce the clearest picture of UK acquisitions.

Sell-side M&A - Get richer potential buyer lists based on actual acquisition behaviour.
Wealth managers - Spot exit events no one else sees and gain new potential HNW clients before competitors know to look.
Client monitoring - Know about ownership changes immediately.
Due diligence - Gain a faster understanding of corporate structure changes vs. waiting for yearly confirmation statements.
Public sector - Improve your impact reporting.
Recruiters - Earlier insight into acquisition events for headhunting.
Sales teams - Trigger events (insurance, consultancy, change management) that no one else is chasing yet.

Beauhurst has lifted the lid on the unannounced acquisition space which makes up 40% of all UK deals.

Discover them now.

Finding the right funds just got much easier. You can now use Natural Language Search across our Funds dataset to instantly build sophisticated investor searches in plain English.

• “Funds that have invested in London-based pharmaceuticals companies”
• “UK funds that can invest £1m in biotechnology companies”
• “Funds that have participated in at least 2 FinTech funding rounds”

Whether you're researching past participants in funding rounds or scouting for potential funders, Natural Language Search will translate your query into a structured set of filters - helping you start from intent, not from scratch.

What you can do now

• Search for funds in plain English: No need to know specific criteria names.
• Instantly build complex searches: Combining industries, location, investment amount, and more.
• Work simpler and faster: With a powerful and intuitive entry point for discovering funds.

Try it now: Select ‘Funds’ on Advanced Search and enter a natural language query to start exploring.

We’ve redesigned the creation flow to make it clearer, more transparent, and easier to set up Collections that work exactly the way you want.

This means fewer irrelevant alerts, improved visibility of your settings, and a smoother, more predictable experience when creating new Collections.

Give it a go next time you build a Collection from an Advanced Search or your Collections page.

From today, any confirmed but not-yet-completed acquisition, fundraising, MBO/MBI, grant, spin-out, or IPO will be published the moment we discover them rather than just upon completion. That means earlier visibility, stronger pipelines, faster BD, and fewer “why didn’t we see this sooner?” moments.

• Completed – closed deals
• Pending – confirmed but not yet completed
• Dormant – no activity for 12+ months
• Cancelled – confirmed to have fallen through.

You'll find Pending, Dormant, and Cancelled deals in:

• Advanced Search
• Company Profiles → Transaction and Timeline tabs
• Collection Activity Alerts.

It’s a small change with a big impact: you’ll now catch deals weeks earlier than before.

If you want a walkthrough or example workflows, contact your account manager, or check them out for yourself with this example Advanced Search.

Meet your new research companion: Lenses. 

Now on the company summary page, lenses generate concise, evidence-based answers to the questions that drive your decisions — before you dig deeper into the data.

How it works

• Choose your focus: Select an outcome lens (Highlights, Growth Trajectory, Financial Health, Innovation & Impact, or People).
• Stay in context: Lenses appear as a panel on the company summary page, so you can access insights as you review companies.
• Get trusted answers: Behind the scenes, the lens connects to company data in our platform, processes it, and returns concise, verifiable insights.

What are the lenses?

• ✨ Highlights: A concise summary of key facts, metrics, and standout detail about the company.
• 📈 Growth Trajectory: Insights into the company’s development, funding, performance, and momentum over time.
• 💊 Financial Health: An assessment of financial stability, resilience, and potential areas of risk.
• 🔦 Innovation & Impact: Considers how the company is driving innovation, sustainability, and positive societal outcomes.
• 🧑‍💼 People: A view into the company’s leadership, shareholders, investors, and connected entities.

What you’ll see

• Lenses at the top of company summary pages.
• Text-based insights tailored to your chosen lens.
• Deep links back to data sources on the company page, so you can verify and explore further.

Why it matters

• Save time by surfacing the most relevant information instantly.
• Increase confidence with insights grounded in trusted company data.
• Work smarter with a companion that explains complex company information in a simple, structured way.

👉 Try out the new Lenses on any company summary page to streamline your research and decision-making.

Try the lenses now

Lenses are powered by AI.

The top bar has been refreshed

• Smarter paths: Core features like Quick Search, Advanced Search, Collections, and All tools now sit neatly on the left, while the actions you take less frequently, such as viewing New Features, browsing Resources, and managing Settings, live on the right behind icons.
• Cleaner experience: A refreshed look and smoother interactions make navigation feel effortless.
• Coming soon: You’ll soon be able to pin your favourite tools for even faster access.

A few things to know

• My Clients has been renamed to Find Funding, to better reflect what it does for you.
• A quick reminder on search:
  • Quick Search – find specific companies by name, CHID, or URL.
  • Natural language search – ask for a list of companies to explore.

Spot Germany’s most innovative companies with our expanded patent coverage.

Our expanded patent add-on now allows you to discover every German company with a granted patent. Search over 1.4 million patents across 63 thousand German companies — all sourced directly from the European Patent Office — and be the first to uncover breakthrough innovation in Germany.

Discover top innovators

Use patent classifications and titles to explore innovation across verticals. Layer on our proprietary Industries to dig even deeper and discover the primary innovators within any sector.

Uncover international activity

See which countries a company has secured patent protection in to understand their commercial ambitions abroad before they even begin operating in those countries.

Be the first to know

Set up a Collection to be alerted to German companies within your market securing patent protection — straight into your inbox.

Already have the patent add-on?

Then you’re good to go — you can access German patents immediately. Just navigate to True Companies on Advanced Search, and use our patent search to discover innovative German companies.

Interested in German patent coverage?

Speak to your account manager today!

Get in touch

Back in early 2024, we launched our revamped industry classifications to better reflect the whole economy. Since then, its coverage has grown even further and now covers 6.7m companies in the UK (100 times the coverage of our old sector classification!) and a further 1.5m in Germany. And we’ve not stopped there — we recently released specific new industries to cover the UK Government’s Industrial Strategy classification of the IS-8, which has had great response from our public sector clients.

With these milestones met, it’s time to start saying goodbye to our old faithful legacy sector classification system. This is to avoid confusion in the platform and to focus our energy on improving the rest of our data and platform features.

Don’t worry, most of you will be unaffected by this change. The majority already use our new and improved industry classifications, so you won’t experience any changes. For those who are using the old system, we’ll reach out directly to support your migration.

Timelines

Step 1: From September 30th 2025, we will stop adding legacy sector classifications to companies and will begin the process of removing them from company pages and other parts of the platform.

Step 2: October 2025 - May 2026 - We will keep returning sectors in Exports, Collection auto-add criteria, and the API to avoid any breaking changes but we advise starting to move any remaining workloads over to our new Industry classification to keep the freshest, most accurate, and highest coverage data. To help provide time for a smooth transition we will guarantee support for returning sectors in these remaining resources until May 31st 2026. NB: Any collections that may still be using sectors after this date will have their auto-add disabled.

If you have any questions about this change or would like support in migration, please use the “Need Help?” button in the platform or get in touch with your account manager and we will be happy to help.