VC / PE research

Find companies before they announce — and size a thesis honestly.

The population is every registered gTLD domain, dated from debut. You can trust the absence of a result as much as its presence.

The job

You are an associate or platform lead at a seed-to-growth fund. Your job is to find companies before they surface, size a thesis area with real counts, and sanity-check diligence against what a company actually runs — not what its deck claims.

Three Signals that do it

First commercial signal Debut domains reaching their first real sign of a business.

~610k/mo

Hiring signal A careers surface + ATS appears — the company is scaling headcount.

~120k/mo

Country expansion The same operator registers a matching ccTLD — geographic expansion.

~46k/mo

Worked example

Sizing a category from the population

Count debut domains in a category cohort that reached a commercial signal within 90 days, by month, for two years. Because the base is the full zone population and not a crawl, the denominator is real — so a flat or falling cohort is a finding you can act on, not a gap in coverage.

287M domains in the Census — the honest denominator

See it against your own market.

A walkthrough uses live data on the accounts or category you care about.

Talk about a research seat → See a live Trace