How To Build Your Own Top Startups List

Ever wondered how we keep coming up with our top startups lists week after week? From the UK’s fastest-growing and most innovative companies, to the ambitious businesses leading the way in Scottish tech, we consistently publish new data and insights on the country’s top startups. But we’d be lying if we said that determining which companies to include in these lists is the hard part. Thanks to the Beauhurst platform, it’s quick and easy to create collections of the most exciting startups and scaleups in the UK’s private company space. We’ll show you how you can build your own.

All companies on the Beauhurst platform

At Beauhurst, we collect comprehensive data on all UK companies, from the smallest startups to market-leading businesses with thousands of employees. And with powerful search and detailed profiles, the Beauhurst platform equips you with all the information you need to discover and understand ambitious businesses that could be your future clients. 

How do we identify companies that are high-growth? Well, we look for signs of external validation that a business is either actively growing or creating ambitious growth plans. Once a company hits one of these eight ‘triggers’, our wonderful Data team will begin collecting and curating information on it.

Identifying interesting startups with Advanced Search

The Advanced Search (AVS) feature is just one of several intuitive tools we’ve created to help subscribers make the most of the Beauhurst platform. You can use AVS to find any UK company that meets one or more of our tracking triggers, and can filter your search across hundreds of datapoints. You’ll see key trends, stats, and visualisations for your results, and you can even export the data for further analysis. 

Creating your own top startup lists

When generating company rankings for our articles, we often filter our searches by a handful of key criteria, such as location, sector, stage of evolution, and amount of investment received. Alternatively, you could focus on company financials, target markets, or COVID-19 impact. You could use AVS to find recipients of Innovate UK grants in the last six months, early-stage startups that were spun out of the University of Bristol, or scaleups currently creating job opportunities during the pandemic. 

There are countless possible searches you could run. Maybe you have something very specific in mind already? For the purposes of this piece, let’s say you’re looking to build a list of Yorkshire and the Humber’s top seed-stage tech companies, all of which have raised equity finance in the past year. You’d simply plug these criteria into AVS, as shown below:

Data-driven results

Through these custom searches, generating a list of companies that meet your requirements is instant and easy. In the example above, AVS found 39 companies matching the chosen search criteria. 

From here, you can then view headline statistics about your selected companies, such as most active investors by both number and value of deals, as well as any recent additions to their profiles, news mentions, and maps to see where in the region they’re located.

And let’s say you wanted to narrow down your search even further, you could quickly add more filters, for instance only looking at the companies in your list that have raised more than £1m in fundraisings (of which there are 11). 

To easily keep track of your results, you can then save them to a Collection, and set it to automatically update as we discover new businesses that meet your search criteria. Plus, you can opt in to email alerts, to be notified whenever new data is added on the companies in your Collection.

If you’d like to start building your own custom searches, book a demo of the Beauhurst platform and one of our Associates will be in touch.