Good things are
being built here.

How we classify businesses

Startups & product companies brings together innovative ventures developing their own products, platforms or technology, alongside relevant established product businesses. Software, hardware, life sciences, manufacturing and consumer products can all qualify. We look for public evidence of an owned product, innovation, a spinout, R&D or a credible repeatable model that can grow beyond individual client work. Investment is optional. This broad view is not a count of confirmed early-stage startups.

Stage is a separate filter. Early stage covers development, launch and initial commercialisation, including first customers. Growth stage needs evidence of expansion. Established describes a mature business. Stage unconfirmed means the available sources do not establish its current development stage; it does not mean inactive or ineligible. Age, funding and customer numbers alone do not decide a stage. Our stage labels do not certify the formal three-year growth threshold used by some scaleup studies.

Local businesses & services includes shops, cafés, agencies, studios, consultancies and professional services. A business with evidenced product and service activity can appear in both views, but is counted once in Everything. A client project alone is not evidence of an agency’s own product. Communities, workspaces, universities and support organisations retain filters based on their role in the ecosystem.

These are editorial classifications from public sources, informed by Dealroom’s entity methodology, the Startup Genome glossary and the government’s comparison of growth definitions. Those sources use different definitions; this map adopts a broad discovery view and makes uncertainty explicit. We retain sources and review dates and welcome corrections.

We cover Leicester city and the wider county of Leicestershire, including its towns and villages. Rutland and neighbouring counties are outside this local view. Each business keeps its actual town; the Leicester city filter does not include surrounding towns. Directory inclusion and map pins are separate. A pin requires a public commercial business address; a registered or mailing address is labelled accordingly. Private residential addresses are not promoted as places to visit. Businesses with verified current town or county presence but no public commercial premises can appear in the directory marked “no map pin”. A university workspace or programme connection is described explicitly, without assuming an office location. County-only entries stay unpinned until a public location is confirmed. This is a growing researched directory, not a census of the ecosystem.

HELP THE MAP GROW

Local knowledge makes a better map.

Organisation submissions, entry corrections and stale-information reports will share a moderated workflow in Phase 3. For this development version, you can already propose a record, flag a correction or report an issue through the project’s issue tracker. Include the entry name, what should change, and a public source.