Corp dev’s hardest questions are denominators: how many companies are in the adjacency, how consolidated is it, who exactly would we be buying against. Analyst reports answer with extrapolation.
We answer with a census — every company in the space, counted, classified, and evidenced from the full web.
Corp dev knows the direct competitive set cold. One adjacency out, the honest answer to “who is in that market?” is usually an analyst report and a stale spreadsheet.
The capability the roadmap needs in eighteen months, the service layer customers keep requesting — these live one adjacency beyond battle-card range, and the institutional map is blank.
Intelligence gets built mandate-by-mandate under deadline, then decays between mandates while targets get acquired and sponsors quietly assemble platforms in assumed whitespace.
PE teams map adjacencies professionally and continuously; strategics mostly map under deadline. The team that watched the space for six quarters writes the better memo — and often the better price.
A TAM slide sourced from a market report is a liability the first time a director asks how the number was built. A census — drillable to named, evidenced companies — is a different genre of claim entirely.
Databases index the companies they found — a subset skewed toward size and visibility. We start from 100M+ classified domains and read every one against your capability definition.
700+ industry categories define the sweep. LLM analysis reads every domain against your adjacency definition — written in your words, re-runnable as the definition sharpens.
Pass 1 triages: one specimen category held 367,478 domains; US-focused triage separated ~17,300 operating companies. Pass 2 extracts 15 structured signals per survivor, every claim quoted with a source URL.
Independent vs. consolidated, service-led vs. product-led, by region, by certification tier — every cell expandable into the actual companies. Follow-up questions are just different cuts of the same evidenced rows.
A session with corp dev and strategy: which capability spaces border the roadmap, what counts as being “in” each one, which criteria disqualify. Vague adjacencies become screenable definitions — we stress-test them against real sites before the run.
Full-web sweep per space: counts, segments, consolidation state, and the evidenced company list underneath. Delivered in weeks, formatted for both the strategy deck and the CRM.
When a census cell becomes a mandate, the same rows become the long list — already scored, already evidenced, with the exclusion log that keeps the IC memo honest.
Monitored spaces produce structured deltas: entrants, exits, ownership changes, repositioning — a one-page structural briefing per space, before the press release rather than after.
Census-backed: every number drills to named, evidenced companies — no extrapolation appendix required.
Several bordering spaces censused under one framework, so the roadmap conversation compares like with like.
Quarterly delta shows consolidation while there is still time to act. Details: whitespace, TAM mapping, market-entry.
All fifteen framework signals ship per company; these six do the strategic work.
The consolidation clock: which companies already belong to groups, quoted from their own announcements. Fragmentation is opportunity; its rate of disappearance is urgency — the single most decision-relevant number a census produces.
Named OEM partnerships, distributorships, and authorizations map the space’s actual wiring — who carries whom, where the choke points sit. Some “fragmented” markets turn out to be tightly federated around two programs.
Fit against your capability definition, not an industry code. “Companies that integrate, not just install” or “service revenue on someone else’s installed base” are screenable sentences here, classified with supporting quotes.
End markets evidenced from case studies and customer pages convert a flat company list into an exposure map. When the question is “does buying here get us into that vertical”, guessed end markets are worse than none.
Online quoting, portals, e-commerce, pricing transparency: how digitally mature each operator is. For build-versus-buy debates this signal cuts both ways — a space full of digitally immature operators is harder to integrate and easier to disrupt, and the census quantifies which.
Activity trajectory separates the space’s living companies from its zombie websites — essential for honest counts. A census that cannot tell the difference inflates the denominator and embarrasses whoever presented it; triage plus this signal is why ours can.
A strategic evaluating entry into industrial water treatment services gets a census with 221 eligible independent operators confirmed, group-owned locations mapped to parents, and segmentation across four axes.
The census sits between database subscriptions and commissioned studies — and undercuts both. One commissioned study typically costs more than censusing three adjacencies with a year of monitoring on each.
Stress-test one adjacency definition against the full web. Validates the discipline before a larger engagement.
Complete census per space: every company classified, scored, and evidenced — ready to become a target list the day the board approves.
Quarterly structural watch with ICP re-runs included as definitions evolve. Full pricing →
Corp dev buys intelligence in three shapes. The failure mode is using any one where another belongs — especially a board-level number built on the wrong instrument.
Buys narrative synthesis and an outside voice. Best for: what to think — positioning, pricing, dynamics. Weakness: dead the day it ships; follow-ups require change orders.
Buys continuous access to profiles. Best for: workflow, contacts, tracking. Weakness: capped at the vendor’s index, silent about everything it never crawled.
Buys the population itself. Best for: what exists — how many, who, where, how consolidated. Re-cuttable along any axis the strategy debate discovers next.
| Commissioned study | Database subscription | Full-web census | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starting pool | Interviews + reports | Vendor’s index | 100M+ classified domains |
| Unit of claim | Synthesized estimate | Company profile | Evidenced company row |
| Follow-up questions | Change order | New filter, same index | Re-cut of the same rows, included |
| Freshness | Fixed at delivery | Vendor refresh cycle | Re-screened on your cadence |
| Auditability | Methodology appendix | Trust the vendor | Quote + source URL per claim |
What it replaces is the unexamined denominator — the number in the deck nobody could defend. What it will not do:
Revenue, EBITDA, valuation are not on websites. A board that catches one guessed number stops trusting the counted ones. The financial layer comes from bankers and diligence.
No flag claims a company is available, receptive, or approachable. Transition context is strictly what companies publish about themselves: founder-associated, independently positioned.
Declined as a standards matter — no engagements in consumer-captive verticals, no exceptions.
Censuses map standing markets. Live processes, relationships, and negotiation remain exactly whose they were.
One email gets the specimen: every company scored and ranked with quoted evidence, exclusions documented. Judge whether your board would trust it.
Request the specimen report