What a private equity firm directory can and cannot tell you

Private equity firms are, on paper, an easy population to catalogue. They raise institutional money, so most of them are regulated somewhere. They want proprietary deal flow, so most of them publish a strategy page. They hire, so they publish a team. Compared with a single-family office, which has no obligation to tell anyone anything, a sponsor is practically shouting.

That apparent openness is what makes private equity data misleading. There is enough public material to build a record that looks complete, and enough missing from it that the gaps get filled with estimates nobody labels as estimates. It is worth being precise about where the line falls before you spend money on any list, this one included.

What is genuinely knowable

That the firm exists and is regulated. This is the floor and it is a solid one. A US manager above the registration thresholds files a Form ADV and appears in the SEC’s Investment Adviser Public Disclosure system. A UK firm conducting regulated activity appears on the FCA’s Financial Services Register. Companies House and its equivalents establish the legal entity, its incorporation date and its filed accounts. None of this tells you what a firm buys, but it tells you the firm is real, which is more than a scraped list can promise.

The strategy the firm claims. Buyout, growth, venture, credit, secondaries. Firms state this prominently because stating it is how they source deals. Taken as a statement of intent from the firm itself, it is reliable. Taken as a description of what the firm has actually done in the last eighteen months, it is not, and the difference matters more than most buyers of data allow for.

Sector focus and stated deal size. Where a firm publishes a range — enterprise value, EBITDA, equity cheque — that range is the firm’s own filter and is the single most useful targeting field there is. It is also the field most often absent. A firm that publishes no range has not told you it will look at anything; it has told you nothing.

Geography, as distinct from address. A firm headquartered in London that invests across the Nordics is a Nordic buyer, and a list that files it under the United Kingdom will lose you the deal. The two fields are different and should be recorded separately.

A route in. A website, an enquiries address, a switchboard, and the partners the firm names on its own team page. This is thinner than data vendors imply but it is real, it is checkable, and for an unsolicited approach it is usually enough.

What is not knowable, and is routinely estimated anyway

Dry powder by firm. This is the most over-claimed figure in private equity data. Committed capital at final close is often announced. What remains uncalled today is a function of deployment pace, recycling, co-investment and secondaries, none of which is public for most firms. A directory that shows current dry powder for hundreds of managers has modelled it. The model may be reasonable; it is still a model, and it is rarely labelled as one.

Whether the firm is actively deploying. A fund that closed two years ago may be nearly fully invested or barely started. Public sources will not tell you which, and a stated mandate is not a live signal. Anyone selling you a “deploying now” flag is selling you an inference.

Partner-level contact details. Named partners are public. Their direct lines and personal addresses generally are not, and where they circulate they have usually been guessed from a naming pattern or bought from a broker. Both are worth less than they look: a wrong address is not neutral, it burns the approach.

Portfolio financials and deal terms. Announcements name the parties. They rarely name the multiple, the leverage or the equity cheque, and where a figure does appear it is often a range supplied by an adviser. Filed accounts help in jurisdictions that require them and do nothing in those that do not.

The distinction that actually decides list quality

There are two ways to classify a firm, and they produce very different products.

The first is to infer the classification: take the deals a firm has appeared in, match the descriptions against a keyword list, and write down what falls out. It is cheap, it scales to thousands of firms overnight, and it is wrong in a specific and unhelpful way — it describes what a firm did, filtered through whichever deals happened to get announced, and presents that as what the firm wants.

The second is to record what the firm says about itself, and to keep the wording that justified the classification against the record. It is slow. It produces a much smaller list. It also produces a list where every row can be defended, which is the only property that matters when you are about to put a name in front of a client.

We do the second, which is why this directory will be smaller than the alternatives and why the coverage page will publish exact counts per region rather than one headline number.

How to interrogate any private equity list before buying it

Ask four questions, and treat evasion on any of them as an answer.

1. Where did the strategy classification come from? If the answer is a model, a keyword match or “our proprietary algorithm”, the field is an inference. It may still be useful. It is not a fact.
2. What proportion of records have a stated deal size? Not “have a deal size field” — have one the firm actually published. This is where padded lists fall apart.
3. What does a blank field mean? It should mean “not published”. If the list fills blanks with estimates, you cannot tell the two apart, and the whole file becomes unciteable.
4. How many firms were rejected? A researcher who checked properly can tell you. A scraper cannot, because nothing was ever rejected.

A smaller list you can defend beats a larger one you cannot. That is not a consolation for having less data; it is the entire argument for buying research rather than a registry export.

Sources

1. Investment Adviser Public Disclosure — U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission; accessed September 6, 2026
2. Financial Services Register — Financial Conduct Authority; accessed September 6, 2026
3. Companies House — Government of the United Kingdom; accessed September 6, 2026