Scout listens to the register live, and scores 1,481,261 owner-led UK companies against 17.7 million company-years of filed history — to surface the ones approaching a sale, before anyone calls.
The scout has one job: continuous, round-the-clock intake of company events, processed the second they're published. When a business files, changes hands or takes on debt, the index already reflects it — so what you're looking at isn't a database that gets refreshed. It's a live picture of the market.
Under the live layer sits the whole history — every account, every ownership move, for every company, as it looked at the time. We keep it point-in-time so the past can be replayed without hindsight. And because we hold the full corpus, everything we claim is an exact measurement over it — never a heuristic invented on the spot. Numbers, not adjectives.
All of that feeds the pattern engine: 40 named archetypes that pull the interesting few out of the millions — succession windows, cash fortresses, quiet compounders. Each is a set of conditions you can point at, recomputed the moment a company files, and strength-rated on seven years of walk-forward history.
| pattern | companies flagged now | sale-signal strength |
|---|---|---|
| B2B tech buyout | 97 | |
| Roll-up: prof. services | 1,191 | |
| Cash fortress | 20,354 | |
| Prime target | 6,981 | |
| Roll-up: healthcare | 2,921 | |
| Roll-up: trades | 1,548 | |
| Quiet compounder | 58,686 | |
| Cash-rich owner | 32,134 |
Hunt a shape we haven't named? Subscribers can have a pattern built to their own thesis — we encode it, run it across the whole index and history, and keep it re-screened live, exactly like the standard set.
Ask for a bespoke patternOn top of it all, models trained on the full history put a number on what happens next: the probability a company changes hands. Calibrated on a year the models never saw — when we say 10%, close to 10% happen. Six of this week's strongest, redacted:
Save your filter and new matches reach you the moment they happen — as anonymised cards. When one looks right, unlock it: the name, the numbers, the why, and live monitoring of its every register move from that day on. Plans are a number of unlocks a month; only the cards you choose to open count.
No card. Tell us what you hunt and the first names arrive the same day.
We watch the whole UK company universe — every filed account, every ownership change, every new filing within seconds of publication. Signals are 40 hand-built patterns validated by walk-forward backtest; probabilities come from models trained on 17.7M point-in-time company-years and calibrated on a held-out year. Names and per-company detail stay in the subscriber feed.