US private fund statistics

Related data: live US registrations feed · fund search & provider network · LP-reported private market performance · where LP numbers diverge

The headline numbers

Formation volume — the new-fund flow

A private fund's first public trace is its Form D — the exempt-offering notice filed on EDGAR when a fund first sells under Regulation D. Counting only filings that declare the issuer a Pooled Investment Fund:

• 10,912 pooled-fund Form D filings were made in 2026 Q2 (new notices + amendments) — SEC Form D quarterly data set, 2026 Q2.
• 6,007 of those were first notices — genuinely new funds, not amendments — 55.0% of the quarter's filings (derived).
• New funds reported $125.1bn ($125,111,075,010) already sold at the filing date — a floor on fundraising, not final fund size — SEC Form D data set, 2026 Q2.
• Those first notices reported 127,361 investors in aggregate — SEC Form D data set, 2026 Q2.
• Per new fund, that averages $20.8m sold and 21.2 investors at first notice (derived means — the distribution is heavily skewed by the largest raises below).
• The live filing pace: 1,762 pooled-fund Form D filings in the 14 days to 2026-07-21 — about 126 a day (derived) — EDGAR full-text search, pulled 2026-07-21.
• The largest first notice of Q2 reported $3.44bn already sold — a Brazil-formed hedge fund with just 9 investors — SEC Form D data set, 2026 Q2.
• The widest first notice reported 32,710 investors (a $2.29bn futures fund) — SEC Form D data set, 2026 Q2.
• The 15 largest first notices of the quarter each reported $1.3bn or more already sold — SEC Form D data set, 2026 Q2. The current list is on the registrations page.

The gotcha: Form D reports what was sold by the filing date, not the final close — read every raise number as an early-close floor, and remember the SEC's own statistics flag that Form D under-captures the private-fund universe (not every issuer files).

Where new funds are formed — by state and country

The state (or country) on a Form D is where the primary issuer is organised — the wrapper's home, not the manager's office. Of 10,912 pooled-fund filings in 2026 Q2:

• New York, California and Delaware together account for 4,546 filings — 41.7% of the quarter (derived).
• The Cayman Islands is the largest non-US place of formation among US Form D filers — 888 filings, more than Texas and Florida.
• Other non-US formations filing Form D in Q2: Luxembourg 170 · United Kingdom 60 · Guernsey 51 — SEC Form D data set, 2026 Q2.

The gotcha: Delaware's third place understates its real role — a fund's primary issuer on Form D is often the feeder or the manager-adjacent entity, and Delaware statutory trusts and LPs sit underneath structures whose primary issuer reports another state.

The same 2026 Q2 flow broken out by domicile — with the offshore registers (Cayman, Luxembourg, Ireland and the rest) at depth — is on fund domicile statistics.

What kind of funds — by declared type

Form D asks the issuer to declare its fund type. The 2026 Q2 split is strikingly even:

• Venture Capital Fund — 2,983 filings (27.3%, derived share) — SEC Form D data set, 2026 Q2.
• Hedge Fund — 2,682 filings (24.6%) — same source.
• Other Investment Fund — 2,651 filings (24.3%) — same source.
• Private Equity Fund — 2,596 filings (23.8%) — same source.
• Top to bottom, the four categories are separated by only 387 filings (derived) — no single strategy dominates US fund formation by count.

Hedge funds may also disclose an aggregate NAV range on Form D — the closest thing the filing offers to a size distribution. In 2026 Q2, 67 hedge-fund filings declared NAV of $1–5m, 42 declared $5–25m, and 30 declared over $100m — SEC Form D data set, 2026 Q2.

Live vs wound down — the Form ADV census

Form D shows the flow; Form ADV Schedule D 7.B.1 shows the stock — every private fund reported by an SEC-registered adviser, cumulative since the bulk data begins in 2011. Fund status is derived: a fund counts as live when its latest filing falls in the final bulk year (2024) and its controlling adviser was still SEC-registered on the IAPD roster of 2026-07-06 (advisers must refile annually, so an older last filing means the fund has almost certainly wound down).

• 165,474 private funds have been reported on Form ADV since 2011 — SEC Form ADV Sch. D 7.B.1, cumulative to 2024-12-31.
• 104,073 of them are still live on the derived test — 62.9% (derived) — same source, adviser roster as of 2026-07-06.
• That implies roughly 61,401 funds have wound down since 2011 (derived difference).
• The live universe spans 73 domiciles — same source.

• 74.9% of live funds are US-domiciled; adding the Cayman Islands takes it to 89.6% (derived shares).
• The Cayman Islands is the only non-US domicile above 3% of the live universe — 14.7% (derived).

The gotcha: "live" here is inferred from the fund's US filing and its adviser's SEC registration for every domicile — for non-US funds it is an approximation, not the local regulator's status, and the census only sees funds whose adviser files Form ADV at all. Explore the underlying funds on the fund search and the domicile chart on the registrations page.

The adviser landscape

• 23,482 investment advisers were SEC-registered on the IAPD firm feed of 2026-07-06 — SEC IAPD.
• Mapping each ADV-reported fund to its named service providers and controlling adviser yields 728,000+ fund-to-provider/adviser links across 165,000+ funds — SEC Form ADV, cumulative 2011–2024, snapshot 2026-07-19.
• Those links name 32,000+ distinct providers (auditors, custodians, administrators, prime brokers, marketers; name variants deduplicated) — same source and snapshot.
• US Form ADV names are the deepest slice of our searchable fund-name index: 165,474 of 254,540 names — 65.0% — with Form D adding 28,467 new-fund names filed since 2025 (11.2%) — index composition as of 2026-07-05.

The provider network is searchable — fund to providers, and provider to every fund it serves — on the Fund Data page.

The registered-fund universe (the public side)

For contrast with the private flow above, the SEC's investment-company series/class file counts the registered universe — mutual funds, ETFs and other '40 Act vehicles regulated under the Investment Company Act 1940:

• 2,040+ investment-company registrants (CIKs) — SEC series/class data, pulled 2026-07-21.
• 19,300+ fund series (a "series" is what an investor would call a fund) — same source and date.
• 43,100+ share-class rows — same source and date.

What the funds actually return — LP-reported private market performance

US public pension plans publish fund-by-fund private-equity performance — the net numbers no commercial database gives away. These are the LP-reported figures (each plan's own reported return, not the fund's headline number). We pool 3,270 fund-level disclosures from eleven plans into their own dedicated pages rather than repeat the detail here:

• Public pension PE performance — the statistics: the numbers in one place (533 funds reported by two or more plans; a 0.39-point median gap where two plans hold the same fund, 8.09 at the widest).
• The private market performance tool: search a fund, read one plan's portfolio, or compare plans side by side.
• Where plans disagree on the same fund: why two honest LP reports of one fund still print different numbers.

Method and coverage gaps

• One source per figure. Form D numbers come from the SEC's quarterly structured data sets and EDGAR full-text search; the fund census from the Form ADV bulk archive; the registered universe from the series/class file; PE performance from the plans' own reports. The slices are not additive across sources.
• Form D is not the whole private-fund universe — the filing follows use of the Regulation D exemption, and the SEC's own statistics flag under-capture.
• The ADV census ends 2024-12-31 — the SEC's fund-level bulk data stops there, so 2025–26 formation shows up in Form D but not yet in the live/closed census.
• Derived figures are labelled — shares, means, differences and the live/closed status are computed from the sourced counts on this page, not reported by the SEC.
• Quarterly figures are a closed quarter (2026 Q2); the 14-day window and the adviser roster carry their own pull dates because they move weekly.