The universe is the list of companies you intend to work, kept in one place with a rank, a tier and a note of where each one came from. It is built from a company-level export you supply, never from people: no contact names, e-mail addresses or phone numbers are accepted.
How do I load companies?
Register the list under Setup → Sources (what it is, who published it, under what licence), then load the export in chunks of up to 500 rows. A row needs a legal name and a country; the registry id, website, segment, size and headquarters help matching. Loading the same file again changes nothing.
Open the UniverseMembers, coverage and setupWhat happens when two rows are the same company?
The same registry id, or the same name in the same country, is one company: the second name is kept as another name for it. The same website under a different name is also one company, unless their registry ids disagree. A name that only matches once “Ltd” or “Inc” is removed is only proposed: it waits under Merge review for you to decide, and a pair you say are different is never proposed again. Nothing is deleted.
What are the cut line and the tiers?
Each segment has a quota. Rank and tier ranks a segment’s companies by fit and puts the best up to its quota inside the cut line; the rest are listed under Below the line with their rank. A spare seat in one segment is never given to another: it shows as a gap on Coverage, with what would close it. Inside the line the best companies are Tier 1, then Tier 2, then Tier 3, and a tier you set by hand stays.
What is the fit score?
A number from 0 to 100 and how sure it is. A fact we do not know counts as nothing, so a company we know little about scores low with low confidence, rather than looking better than it is. Weights are rows you can change under Setup → Fit weights: saving makes a new version, and scores already written keep naming the version that made them. Re-score applies the new weights.
What if the page says it isn’t set up?
That means the universe is not installed on this server yet. It is not an empty list, and nothing can be saved until it is. If a page says it couldn’t load, try again: it does not guess that nothing is there.