Where can I find companies with the data my product needs?

Companies don't publish what internal data they hold. The software a company runs gives you a clue to the internal data it may hold. Start with help desks such as Zendesk or Freshdesk for support tickets, Salesforce for sales records, Shopify for orders, and Amplitude or Mixpanel for product usage events. Find companies using those tools, then narrow the list to your market and company size.

The software shows up in job posts. A company hiring a support agent who knows Zendesk, or a sales operations manager to run its Salesforce, is telling you which system its data lives in. We read those posts to map which tools each company uses, and on 6 November 2026 that map held 7,512 US companies with 25 to 500 employees that use a customer support help desk.

Why does a company's software tell you what data it holds?Copy Anchor Link

Every business tool writes records as people use it. The tool decides the shape of the data, so the tool is a better clue than the company's industry or description. Two retailers of the same size can hold very different data. One runs its support on email, while the other has every conversation tagged and stored in a help desk.

Here is how common data types map to the software that produces them, with how many US companies of 25 to 500 employees (direct employers only) our data shows in each software category on 6 November 2026:

CRM data is the easiest to find, product usage data the scarcest

In the same market, about 51,000 companies run a CRM and about 3,700 run product analytics.

Who is this search for?Copy Anchor Link

It fits anyone whose product starts with someone else's data. AI labs and training data providers look for companies whose support tickets, sales records or analytics could train a model. Data product companies look for businesses whose transactions or usage records they could license and package into a dataset or benchmark. In both cases the tool only stands for the data inside it. Choose the software category by the data your product needs, then select the tools within it.

How do you build the search in the app?Copy Anchor Link

Open a company search and add these filters:

1. Technology: pick the tools that produce your data. For support tickets, Zendesk, FreshDesk, Gorgias, Zoho Desk, Help Scout and Kustomer.
2. Keyword confidence: High and Medium, to keep companies where the evidence is strongest.
3. Last date found: a date about six months back, so the tool was mentioned recently.
4. HQ Country and Employees: the market and size you can serve. We used United States and 25 to 500.
5. Company type: Direct employer, so staffing firms that post jobs for their clients drop out.

You can start from Keyword category instead of Technology to take a whole category in one filter, then narrow it once you have seen what the category contains (see the pitfalls below). Counting results is free; you only spend credits when you reveal or export companies.

AI agentAPIApp

Using the TheirStack MCP, find companies that use a customer support help desk:

• Technology is any of: zendesk, freshdesk, gorgias, zoho-desk, help-scout, kustomer
• Keyword confidence is any of: high, medium
• Last date found on or after 2026-05-06
• HQ Country: US
• Employees: 25 to 500
• Company type: direct employer

Return the count, then the first 10 companies with their domain and the help desk found.

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curl --request POST 'https://api.theirstack.com/v1/companies/search' \
  --header 'Authorization: Bearer <YOUR_API_KEY>' \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data '{
    "company_country_code_or": ["US"],
    "min_employee_count": 25,
    "max_employee_count": 500,
    "company_type": "direct_employer",
    "tech_filters": {
      "keyword_slug_or": ["zendesk", "freshdesk", "gorgias", "zoho-desk", "help-scout", "kustomer"],
      "confidence_or": ["high", "medium"],
      "last_date_found_gte": "2026-05-06"
    },
    "limit": 10
  }'

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• Technologyany of Zendesk, FreshDesk, Gorgias, Zoho Desk, Help Scout, Kustomer
• Keyword confidenceany of High, Medium
• Last date foundon or after 2026-05-06
• HQ CountryUnited States
• Employees25 to 500
• Company typeDirect employer

Open this search

Through the API, each company returned costs 3 API credits, so the 10 above cost 30. In the app, revealing a company costs 1 company credit and keeps it open for 90 days.

How many companies match, and what do they look like?Copy Anchor Link

On 6 November 2026 the same six help desks gave us 7,512 US companies of 25 to 500 employees at high or medium confidence. Adding the six month window on Last date found brings that down to 2,434 that mentioned their help desk recently.

The results show one column per help desk, with its confidence for each company. The top matches mix a 451 person internet company, a 127 person chain of massage studios and a 339 person technology company, each with Zendesk at high confidence and between 87 and 217 job posts naming it. Hover a help desk cell to see how many job posts mention the tool, when it was first and last seen, and a link to those posts. That link is how you check a match before you write to the company.

How do you work the list?Copy Anchor Link

Contact the person who owns the data, since they are the one who can say yes to sharing it. For support tickets that is usually the head of support or customer experience; for sales records, the head of sales operations; for analytics, the head of data or the CTO. At the smaller end of 25 to 500 employees, a data partnership may go straight to the COO or the CEO.

Open with the data you want and what happens to it: which records, how they will be anonymized, and what the company gets back. The job posts help here, because they show the tool by name. "Your support team works in Zendesk" is a better first line than a guess about their industry.

Reach them while the tool is current. Tighten Last date found to the last month to start with the companies that named the tool most recently, then save the search and turn on email alerts for new matches.

What goes wrong with this search?Copy Anchor Link

A category can hold more than its name suggests. In our catalogue the Helpdesk category also holds ServiceNow, an IT service management tool, and a few meeting tools. When we ran the Helpdesk category on its own, the top results were IT consultancies posting hundreds of ServiceNow roles, which hold IT tickets but not customer conversations. Other tools sit in categories you would not guess. NetSuite is filed under Resource Scheduling and DocuSign under Email Signature. Open the category, look at which tools it holds, and keep the ones that produce your data.

Some tool names are ordinary words. Groove is a help desk, but a steel fabricator matched it at high confidence because its welder job posts ask for "fillet and groove welds". Read two or three of the job posts behind a match before you trust a tool with a common name, or leave that tool out.

Old evidence is still evidence. One software company in our sample had 113 job posts naming Zendesk, but the last one was from 2022. Last date found removes those.

A tool that never appears in a job post is invisible to us. Companies that don't hire for the team that uses the tool, or don't name it when they do, won't show up, so treat the count as the companies you can find this way, not as everyone who uses the tool.

Open the help desk search and swap in the tools that hold your dataCopy Anchor Link

Open the help desk search in the app and replace the six help desks in Technology with your own tools. The company search docs list every filter, and how we source tech stack data explains the confidence levels. To run the same search from an AI assistant, connect the TheirStack MCP server.