PitchBook is often cited as the reference platform for global private capital. It covers venture and private equity deals, fund performance, investor histories, and cap tables on the companies it tracks internationally.
However, institutional fundraising only reveals one segment of the market. In the UK, for example, there are 5.1m active companies on the company register, with only 27.4k ever having raised investment.
Those companies are where most UK mandates originate, and the research decides whether you approach at all. You need to know who owns the business, what the accounts show, which firms advised each side of the last deal, and whether it has won a grant or filed a patent recently. A funding record alone won’t tell you any of this.
This article covers nine alternatives to PitchBook, including the range of coverage across each platform and where they fall short.
Where PitchBook falls short on UK coverage
Coverage beyond the funded segment
In September 2025, PitchBook moved beyond the deal-backed companies it was built on, adding more than 2m UK company profiles. It reports five years of financial history on 85% of the new additions. However, that 2m is a selection from the 5.1m active companies on the UK register.
The deals that never get announced
Around 70% of UK equity fundraisings are never announced publicly. They appear as share allotment filings at Companies House, sometimes months after the deal completes.
Around 40% of UK acquisitions are similarly quiet, visible in filings well before they reach the press, if they reach it at all. A dataset built from announcements and analyst verification has no route to either. A company that has recently raised twice can appear never to have raised at all, so it won’t surface in a search built on funding activity.
Monitoring between deals
A tracked deal record may tell you what happened, but it won’t offer any context beyond it. For example, you won’t know that a company has just been awarded an innovation grant, secured its first patent, spun out of a university, joined an accelerator cohort, or grown its headcount by 20% a year for three consecutive years.
PitchBook leaves a gap for any team whose targeting depends on knowing that a business has changed shape since the last time anyone looked at it.
Different platforms, different totals
Providers report different investment figures, and the gap usually comes down to methodology: whether secondary share sales count alongside new share issues, whether a filing or a press release sets the deal date, and whether a UK subsidiary of a global business counts as a UK deal.
None of those choices are incorrect, but they produce materially different totals. We’ve set out our own methodology, and how it compares with PitchBook’s and Dealroom’s, in our full breakdown of why investment data varies between providers.
Nine alternatives to PitchBook for UK private company data
Beauhurst
Beauhurst tracks every active company on the UK register, along with every active German company. Legal entities are consolidated into single company profiles in the form of True Companies, so a group filing through a dozen subsidiaries reads as one business, making reporting clearer.
Some of the key data points on Beauhurst:
- Unannounced transactions: 70% of UK equity fundraisings and 40% of UK acquisitions never reach the press.
- Filed accounts and ownership: financial history, shareholders, persons with significant control (PSCs), cap tables, charges, and group structure, all sourced from filings.
- Signals as search criteria: more than 20 Signals across four classes: Growth, Innovation, Environmental and Social and Governance (ESG), and Risk. Each works as a filter, so a cohort can be defined by what companies have done, including grants awarded, patents granted, spinout status, accelerator cohorts, sustained turnover or headcount growth, and risk indicators.
- Trigger-based monitoring: save a search as a Collection and matching companies are added as soon as they qualify, with alerts on new matches and on activity against companies already in your Collections.
- Deal context: the advisers on both sides of a transaction, alongside a company’s growth stage, a manually verified industry classification, and searchable keyword tags covering what a business actually does.
Beauhurst has limits, with coverage of just the UK and Germany (for now), so a global mandate needs a second source.
Crunchbase
Crunchbase began as a TechCrunch project tracking startup funding and now holds a global database of companies, rounds, and investors, drawing on news coverage and community submissions.
It’s self-serve, inexpensive and quick to start with, which makes it a reasonable first stop for early-stage research across several markets at once.
Funding data is announcement-led and partly user-submitted, so UK records can lag and pre-seed activity is unreliable. Outside the startup segment, there isn’t much UK company data to work with.
Dealroom
Dealroom maps European technology ecosystems in real detail, tracing how investors, accelerators, and sector clusters connect across the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands and the Nordics. Its derived metrics, including calculated growth rates and web activity, are deeper than those of most platforms here.
Coverage is weighted towards companies that have raised, and funding records lean on announcements, so unannounced UK activity is missing. In short, Dealroom is strong for European tech-focused mandates, but for in-depth UK private company research, it covers only a narrow slice of the market.
Bureau van Dijk (Orbis and FAME)
Moody’s runs Orbis as its global company database, with FAME as the UK and Ireland cut. Both draw UK company data from Companies House, so the underlying register matches what other UK platforms hold. Their distinctive strengths are cross-border ownership mapping and estimated revenue for companies filing below the disclosure threshold.
Classification runs on SIC and NACE codes, group financials come entity by entity, and neither product tracks unannounced deals or growth signals. Entity counts also inflate against real businesses, which becomes a problem for groups with hundreds of subsidiaries. Tesco alone comprises more than 360 entities.
