A sector total depends on how the provider drew its edges

The record

PitchBook's Report Methodologies page, a living document reflecting its content as retrieved on 16 September 2026, states that companies it tracks have a primary industry as well as secondary industries, and that its industry and sector rankings are built using each company's primary industry alone. Crunchbase's own methodology page, also retrieved 16 September 2026, states that its editorial team bases sector coverage on one or more industries and industry groups Crunchbase defines, but that reporters may augment those official categories by including companies matching related keywords in a company's description, citing cannabis-related terms as an example.

What the sources establish

PitchBook allows a company to carry more than one industry tag but resolves a given ranking report to a single primary industry, which means summing PitchBook's sector totals across every sector it tracks will overcount total activity wherever companies also carry secondary tags outside that primary category. Crunchbase's methodology page establishes that a sector figure quoted in one of its news articles can be a keyword-expanded editorial set rather than a strict count of companies formally tagged under that category in its underlying database.

Scope and revision

Neither taxonomy is incorrect; each serves the purpose its publisher built it for. PitchBook's primary-industry convention supports clean league-table rankings at the cost of hiding a company's other listed activities. Crunchbase's editorial augmentation supports readable trend coverage of an emerging theme at the cost of making a news-article sector total diverge from what a database query on the same category label would return. Neither page states a fixed cross-provider crosswalk between its own categories and another provider's, and none should be assumed.

The decision in front of you

Before comparing a sector total across two providers, or across two articles from the same provider, a reader should establish whether the number is a primary-industry ranking, a raw category-tag count, or a keyword-expanded editorial set. This is an editorial checklist, not a rule stated by either provider.

• Does the sector total use a company's primary industry only, or every industry tag it carries?
• Has the sector's boundary been expanded editorially beyond the platform's formal category?
• Would summing this sector total with others from the same provider double-count any companies?

A sector label is a classification choice each provider makes on its own terms, and two truthful sector totals about the same broad theme can disagree simply because they drew the category's edges differently.