Looking at the Data: Trends We’re Seeing with Axial’s New Industry Taxonomy

It’s been one month since we launched our new industry taxonomy. In light of this, we thought we’d share some of the trends in the data.

What Are Members Looking For?

This word cloud looks at the most popular search terms when people were exploring the industry taxonomy in February. Some context: our industry taxonomy now has over 18,000 industry categories or “nodes” to select from when describing a company coming to market or the types of companies you want to buy or provide with capital. Some people browse the tree and others use search to jump to what they are looking for. The terms above were searched at least 10 times by our sell-side and buy-side members. As you can see, big areas of interest include: engineering, aerospace, staffing, insurance, restaurants, plumbing, health, and pets. Some smaller, yet interesting terms to note are the growing interest in cannabis, e-commerce, internet, and government industries.

What Types of Deals Are on Axial?

If we look at the graph above, we can see the sell-side deals on Axial for February by top-level industry vertical. Deals in the industrials industry are definitely the most popular, followed by technology, consumer, healthcare, business services, and transportation. Of course, this is only the top level — actual businesses are classified far more specifically now, such as “Chain hoists manufacturing”, “Assisted living facilities”, “Application Service Provider” and “Bulk Liquids Trucking (Long Distance)”.

While we’ve always been able to track industry vertical, we are now able to clearly see patterns in the kinds of business/revenue models on the network. This graph again shows February deals, and reveals that services and manufacturing are the most common types of businesses.