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A spinout is a company created to commercialise research or technology developed at a university or research institution. Identifying these companies can help you analyse how research moves into the economy and compare spinout activity across sectors and places. Industry Engine identifies spinouts from two groups:
  • every company in the HESA spin-out register;
  • companies we identify ourselves and judge to be spinouts, which are mostly too recent to appear in the register yet.
Both groups set the same company-level Spinout field. The sections below explain each one, because they do not carry the same certainty.

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The HESA register

HESA publishes the register as open data under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. As the licence requires, we credit the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) as the source. The source includes:
  • the spinout’s name and, for UK companies, its Companies House registration number;
  • the associated higher education provider, its UK Provider Reference Number, and the provider’s region and country;
  • incorporation and foundation years;
  • company status and website;
  • whether several higher education providers were involved;
  • whether the company is a social enterprise; and
  • broad subject areas: Medicine, Health and Life Sciences; Physical Sciences, Engineering and Mathematics; Social Sciences; and Arts and Humanities.
HESA updates the register about twice a year. We download it each month, format Companies House numbers as eight characters, convert yes or no fields to boolean values, standardise month values and clean website URLs. We validate the result against an expected schema and keep one record for each company and higher education provider relationship.

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Spinouts we identify ourselves

The register is authoritative, but it lags. A company can spin out a year or more before HESA publishes it. To close that gap we look for spinouts that the register does not list yet, in the period from the register’s most recent entries onwards.
1

Find candidates

We look at three things: which companies are owned by a university or its technology transfer company, what companies say about themselves on their own websites, and university spinout announcements.
2

Judge each candidate

A language model reads the evidence for each candidate and answers whether the company is a spinout, which university it came from, and which text supports that. We keep the supporting quote and, where there is one, the announcement link.
3

Publish the decided spinouts

Companies judged to be spinouts join the register entries in the list Industry Engine reads. A company we have published stays listed until HESA lists it or Companies House dissolves it.
We do not apply this to companies already in the register. The register entry is used as it stands.

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What period the data covers

The register goes back to the late 1950s, but most of the data is recent. There are only a handful of companies for each year before 2000. The count rises through the 2000s and roughly doubles in 2012. From then on the register lists between about 130 and 200 companies a year. About half of the companies in the register were founded in 2017 or later. The most recent years hold fewer companies than they eventually will. HESA publishes the register about twice a year, and a company can spin out a year or more before it appears. The last two or three years of the register are therefore still filling up. Do not read the lower counts in those years as a fall in spinout activity. Our own identification covers that gap. We look at the twelve months before the register’s most recent entries, and at every month after them. This boundary is not a fixed date. It moves forward each time HESA publishes a new release. The twelve-month overlap is deliberate, because the most recent year of the register is the least complete part of it.

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Find spinouts in Industry Engine

Use the Spinouts option in the Growth filters to focus your results on companies identified as spinouts. See using filters for more information. The company-level Spinout field is also available in company data. You can find its definition in the data dictionary.
The deprecated Spinout field attached to investment rounds is always 0 and should not be used to identify spinout companies. Use the company-level field described here.

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Limitations

  • The field mixes two kinds of evidence. A register entry is a matter of record. A company we identified ourselves is our assessment, and we can be wrong about it. The field does not tell you which group a company came from.
  • We identify spinouts ourselves only for the recent period the register has not reached. We do not go back and reassess older companies that HESA never listed.
  • Coverage of the register depends on the records HESA publishes.
  • Industry Engine is built around Companies House records. A spinout that cannot be linked to a company record may not appear on the platform.
  • A company can be associated with more than one higher education provider. The company-level field shows whether it is a spinout, not the number of provider relationships.
  • We process the sources monthly. Changes appear after the next pipeline and platform update.
Last modified on September 15, 2026