Software houses: which companies have just entered a build phase

Nobody commissions a project because their system is old. They commission it because something happened: money arrived, a goal landed on the next two quarters, and a role now owns it. Between that moment and the choice of a vendor there are usually weeks, not months. Those weeks are your window.

The window closes in two ways, not one. Either the company picks a vendor, or it decides to hire and build in-house. That is why technical hiring is a double signal: it says the build has started, and it says the build-or-buy question is still open.

A list by industry, size and region is therefore not an advantage — everyone selling what you sell can buy the same one. The difference is the date: not who fits, but where something has just changed, and where you read it.

• Funding or an EU subsidy. A round, a loan or an awarded grant is a budget with a date and a stated purpose. The announcement usually says what the money is for, which hands you an opening sentence.
• Active hiring. Engineering, product and implementation roles tell you what a company means to build, in what, and how fast. The stack in a job ad is often more precise than anything on the company's own site.
• Headcount growth. It confirms the hiring was a direction, not a single advert. A team that grows quarter after quarter fills up with maintenance faster than with new work, and that is when a company first asks what to hand outside so that the engineers it already pays for do what they were hired to do.
• A management change. A new role owning technology or operations brings its own plan and its own budget, and the first months are when that plan is still being written. People are described by role here — Pursiva stores no names and no contact details.

A sketch of a single entry, without a name — the names come from what a run finds against your own offer.

The company: a mid-sized manufacturer with an internal IT team that maintains rather than builds. Why it fits: the profile read from your site says you sell integrations and internal systems to manufacturers of that size, and this one runs them across several disconnected tools.

Why now: an awarded digitisation grant announced this quarter, and engineering roles that have stayed open for weeks. The evidence: every why-now sentence carries a link to the page it was read from, and a date. A sentence without a link never reaches the list.

The entry carries a score and a rank; a run ranks at most 40 companies, so the list can be read in one sitting. The whole thing reaches you within an hour of the run being paid for — automatically, with no queue in between.

The profile is built from your own site: what you build, for whom, in which technologies, and at what project size the work makes sense. In this segment that means companies large enough to hold a project budget and a counterpart role on their side, and small enough that the vendor decision is still made locally.

The exclusions matter more than the criteria, because they remove most of what merely looks like a fit. Sellers here usually exclude: other software houses and agencies, which buy subcontracting rather than projects; sole traders and micro companies, where the numbers never work; public institutions, unless you bid in tenders; subsidiaries of international groups where the vendor is chosen abroad; and the companies you already deliver to.

You see that profile and correct it before you pay, and before the expensive part — the market research — begins. The finished list is then checked against the profile's own exclusions by rule rather than opinion, and an entry that trips one is held back instead of landing in front of you.

Frequently asked questions

Can Pursiva find companies that are looking for a software house?

No, because nobody knows that. Pursiva finds companies where something happened that starts a build: funding or an EU subsidy, active hiring, headcount growth, a management change. Every signal keeps a link to its source and a date, so you judge whether the window is still open.

Do I get contact details for the decision makers?

No. Pursiva describes companies, not people: it stores and shows no personal names, addresses or numbers. A decision maker is described by role, and the company is identified by its entry in the public REGON register, which also carries the KRS number. How you make contact stays with you.

Read next

• Buying signals
• Paste your website address
• Start a run