Help: Emerging Spaces tool and methodology

The Emerging Spaces feature gives you access to new and disruptive markets, technologies, products, or services. This tool provides you with the trending spaces and technologies we’ve identified and can show you the new application of a technology, product, or service to a given market. Emerging Spaces are business areas that are primed for increased funding due to shifts in regulation, complementary technologies, culture, or other external factors.

With the Emerging Spaces tool, you can gather an overview of new spaces and dive deeper to analyze their growth metrics. This article provides the definitions and methodology you need to understand this feature and guides you through how to use it.

To view PitchBook’s Emerging Spaces, click on Emerging Spaces in the Market Analysis section on the left sidebar.

Identifying an Emerging Space

Emerging Spaces are new markets, technologies, products, or services or new applications of a technology, product, or service to a given market that are experiencing recent popularity growth (such as an increase in news or investment activity) and tend to have little to no activity before the growth period.

Our Emerging Spaces team uses the following methods to determine our Emerging Spaces:

• Primarily, our Emerging Technology Analysts provide updates on new trends and technologies within each of their coverage areas.
• Our Data Operations team identifies new Emerging Spaces as part of their workflow.
• We use algorithms to identify significant mentions of keywords in the news, ensuring that we don’t miss something if there’s an area getting more press than usual. When this happens, the keywords are then sent to our analysts to investigate further. This allows us to ensure we don’t miss trends in all the corners of the investment landscape.
• Suggestions are also provided by our Customer Success and Sales teams based on feedback that they receive.

To be considered an Emerging Space, the technology or trend must have the following criteria:

• Company Count – The space contains more than five but generally fewer than 200 companies. If spaces have more than 200 companies, this indicates that the technology is still nascent and not adopted enough to reach the mainstream. Once a space crosses this number, we evaluate whether it should become a vertical, be removed from Emerging Spaces, or stay an Emerging Space.
• News Volume – A minimum of 10 relevant news articles published in the last six months.
• Potential for Growth – A subjective analysis of whether the technology or trend is likely to become more prominent in the future. This occurs during a review of the news activity.
• Deal Count – At least 20% of companies in this space have registered deal activity.

Note: A vertical is not the same as an Emerging Space. A vertical is a set of companies that operate in a similar space that cuts across industries. Verticals can be new or established. By contrast, Emerging Spaces are always new, innovative, and disruptive, with recent, significant growth. They can be markets, products, technologies, or services.

Emerging Spaces list and descriptions

Once an Emerging Space has been identified, a thorough content review process is undertaken related to underlying conditions in this area, such as why the trend is occurring now, its chief applications, the technologies it relies on, and its near-term outlook. This information is used to inform much of the content on the landing page for each Emerging Space.

For definitions and details of all Emerging Spaces in PitchBook, download the complete list attached below.

Emerging Spaces company methodology

While compiling this information, our analysts use the PitchBook Platform and third-party sources to aggregate a representative company list. Emerging Space company lists are intended to provide a strong overview of the key players, as well as some minor players, but they are not exhaustive. Keywords are used to curate the list of companies to ensure accuracy, and you can see which keywords are used for each Emerging Space on its respective landing page.

Emerging Space Briefs are one-page primers on an Emerging Space written by our Emerging Technology analysts. They allow you to dive deeper into emerging markets.

You can access Emerging Space Briefs from a few different places on PitchBook:

• Search for Emerging Space Briefs from the General Search bar and within the Research Center.
• On the homepage of the Emerging Spaces feature, access them from the side drawer on the right under the Analyst Research tab, shown below.
• Access Emerging Space Briefs after you’ve selected View Trend Analysis on a specific space.

Navigating the Emerging Spaces list

When you first navigate to the Emerging Spaces page, you will see an aggregate view of all Emerging Spaces. To customize your view or narrow your focus, you have a few options, numbered in the image below:

1. Narrow the industry sector selection.
2. Change the metric used for the size of the Emerging Spaces in the menu.
3. Turn off Group by Sector to sort the spaces in the map by size only.
4. Apply filters to include only companies that fit particular parameters, such as company location, year founded, or deal types that the companies have completed.
5. Switch between Grid View, which shows the size-based treemap, and List View, which sorts the Emerging Spaces in a data table of alphabetical order.

Once you have the Emerging Spaces view you want, hover over or click on an individual Emerging Space to view details and explore the companies within the space. For a full list of companies in that Emerging Space and additional details, click View Trend Analysis.

Exploring an Emerging Space

Once you’ve clicked on View Trend Analysis, there are several new tools available to help you learn more about this Emerging Space.

1. Note that if you had applied filters to the landing page visualization, those filters will not apply to the trend analysis page. You can add filters to individual spaces by clicking Filters in the top ribbon.

a. If a metric includes a time frame in the label (e.g., TTM, Last 6 Months, etc.), it does not change based on the related time frame filters. The filters impact all other components.

b. The Recent News and Trending Keywords in the News sections will not update based on your filters since they always show recent news.

2. For a deeper view of companies, deals, or investors in the Emerging Space, click on the boxes underneath Quick Stats to see a full list of this information in an advanced search format.

a. Although it is not possible to save your Emerging Spaces view, you can use this list to save the companies, deals, or investors as a list if you want to set alerts or use them in future searches.

3. The Deals Over Time bubble chart shows deal sizes in this Emerging Space over time. Each bubble represents a deal.

a. Below the chart, click on the values in the legend to remove bubbles for deal types that you do not need to see. Your chart will automatically adjust its scale if outlier values are removed. Click the values again to add them back in.

b. If you click on a single bubble, the chart will highlight all the deal bubbles for that company.

c. You can download this bubble chart as a PNG by clicking the Download button in the right-hand corner of the bubble chart.

Sharing and downloading

You can share your Emerging Space directly from the platform with other users via email or link.

Option 1. Click the Share button in the upper right corner of a profile to open the Sharing menu. From here, you have two options:

• Enter any email address, regardless of the recipient’s PitchBook license status, into the Send via Email box. When you click Send, the recipient(s) will receive an email with a link to download the content.
• Use the Share link. Only users with a PitchBook license can access this link, which takes users directly to the Emerging Space on the PitchBook platform when clicked.

Option 2. Click the Quick Link icon next to the Share button to share a link to an Emerging Space. This operates the same as the Share Link mentioned above.

To download a Word or PDF export of the Emerging Space you’re viewing:

1. Click Download in the top ribbon.

2. Select Word or PDF from the drop-down menu.

Downloading an Emerging Space does not count against your download limits.

Emerging Spaces can also be used as search criteria in screeners. Combine Emerging Spaces with other criteria to pull targeted lists of companies and deals related to spaces of interest.

1. You can search by Emerging Spaces in any Industries, Verticals, and Keywords field throughout PitchBook that applies to companies. Type the name of the Emerging Spaces into the Industries, Verticals, and Keywords field, or browse the list of Emerging Spaces where provided.
2. Once you’ve added Emerging Spaces and any other criteria of interest, click Search in the upper right corner.

3. Within your search results, add the Emerging Spaces column to see the Emerging Spaces associated with any companies in your search results. This column is available on both the Companies and Deals search results tabs. To add the column, click Edit table and then Edit columns.