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Some of your best prospects aren’t defined by where they are but by what stage they’re at — recently funded startups, fast-growing scale-ups, or established public companies in a sector. The Funded & high-growth companies Search Agent finds companies by their firmographic profile rather than by reading their website area-by-area. It’s one of two ways to search for companies. The other — Local & service businesses — is best for local, service, and bricks-and-mortar firms found by area. This page covers the funded/high-growth engine.
Choose Funded & high-growth companies when you’re targeting companies by funding, growth, size band, or “tech/startup” characteristics — for example “Series B fintechs in London” or “high-growth SaaS with 200–500 staff”. Choose Local & service businesses when you’re targeting a trade or service in an area, like “roofers in Surrey”.
Go to Discovery → Search Agents, click Create New Search Agent, choose Find companies, then switch the toggle to Funded & high-growth companies.

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Pipeline

Pick which profile type matched companies should land in — Customer (ICP), Vendor (IVP), Partner (IPP), Supplier (ISP), or Competitor (CP). This decides which pipeline and module the companies appear in, exactly as it does for other Search Agents.

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Search details

Define what you’re looking for with structured filters. At least one filter is required.

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Advanced filters

Open Advanced filters to narrow further. All are optional and stack together:
Start with just an industry (and maybe a location), check the match count, then add advanced filters one at a time to tighten the list. Over-filtering early can leave you with very few matches.

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Live match count

As you build your filters, the form shows a live estimate — “~N companies match” — so you can gauge how broad or narrow your search is before you create it. Use it to strike the right balance between reach and relevance.

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Who to enrich (People)

Like other Search Agents, you can tell enrichment who to look for at each matched company — primary and fallback job functions, and your ideal economic buyer. You can also opt into deeper contact sourcing. See Enrichment and Enrichment Profiles for the full detail.

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Ideal Company Profile (optional, for scoring)

The structured filters do the hard filtering. On top of that, you can add an optional Ideal Company Profile — a short, plain-language description of your ideal company. Alva uses it to score how well each matched company fits, purely so you can prioritise the best-fit companies for outreach. This is scoring, not filtering — a low score never discards a company. The brief follows the same rules as any Search Agent description: it can only ask for things determinable from a company’s website (company type, industry, market, broad size tier), not headcount numbers, funding, technology stack, or hiring status. Alva validates it and suggests a fix if it contains something unmatchable. See what makes a good description.
Leave the brief blank to skip scoring entirely. If you set one, matched companies get a % match badge and a Profile Match Analysis card on their detail page — the same display as other scored results.

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Result limit (your cost dial)

This engine is bounded by a result limit (default 25) rather than by geography. The search runs until it has imported that many companies, then pauses automatically so you can review before spending more.
1

Start small

Leave the limit low — say 25 — when you first activate.
2

Review what came in

Check the companies and contacts that were imported. Are they the right fit?
3

Raise the limit

Happy? Increase the limit on the Search Agent page and the search resumes automatically, picking up where it left off.
This engine has no geography spread or throttle-speed setting — those apply only to the Local & service businesses engine. Here, pace is governed entirely by the result limit.

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What happens after import

Each matched company is imported and then runs through the standard enrichment pipeline — contacts, emails, seniority ranking, and (if you set an Ideal Company Profile) a fit score. Once enriched, companies are ready for a BDR agent to work through, best-fit first. Edit the filters, brief, or result limit while the search is in draft or paused (pause it first if it’s active). Saving returns it to draft so re-activating runs cleanly against the new criteria. Companies already imported stay in your CRM — to find more under the new criteria, raise the result limit above the current count and re-activate. You’re never charged twice for the same company.

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Costs

Each company found uses credits, and enrichment is charged per company when contacts are found (plus the optional deeper Tier 2 Contact Search if you switch it on). The result limit keeps this predictable — you only ever spend up to the number of companies you’ve asked for. See Settings → Usage for a live breakdown and Understanding Credits for how billing works.

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Managing with Alva

You can set this up conversationally — just ask Alva:
  • “Find Series B AI companies in London.”
  • “Set up a search for VC-backed cyber startups with 50–200 staff.”
  • “Raise the limit on my fintech search to 100.”
Alva picks the right engine for you: firmographic requests like these become a Funded & high-growth search, while “roofers in Surrey” becomes a Local & service businesses search and “find me CISOs” becomes a People Search. If a request is ambiguous, Alva asks one quick question first.