Owing to ever shorter innovation cycles, it has become more and more challenging to predict approaching market convergence. This study aims to overcome this problem by providing a novel method for anticipating market onvergence using start-up formation as an indicator. Life cycle analysis is employed in this article to examine the anticipation of the convergence process. The analysis is conducted on the field of probiotics in the nutraceutical and functional foods, cosmeceutical and nutricosmetic cross-industry sectors. The results of the analysis, which monitored start-up formation throughout the process, indicate that formation of start-up companies can be used to predict the transition from technology to market convergence. To this end, the present study also proposes a novel approach to identify start-up formation based on data from press releases.