Form ADV Lookup

What Form ADV tells you

Form ADV is the backbone of investment adviser regulation in the United States. Every firm that manages money for clients — from a two-person RIA to a trillion-dollar asset manager — files it with the SEC or its home state, and updates it at least once a year. Part 1 is a structured data form: regulatory assets under management, the number and categories of clients, employee headcount, custody arrangements, control persons, and any disciplinary events. Part 2 is the narrative brochure that describes the firm’s services, fees, and conflicts of interest in plain English.

For anyone trying to understand the money-management landscape, that structured data is gold. It is filed under penalty of perjury, refreshed on a predictable cadence, and covers the entire registered universe. You can see at a glance how big a firm is, what kind of clients it serves, and whether it advises private funds — all without a data subscription.

Who files it — and why it matters for fundraising

The firms in this dataset are not just competitors to study; many of them are potential limited partners. Registered investment advisers, wealth managers, and multi-family offices routinely allocate client capital to venture, private equity, private credit, and hedge funds. A firm’s Form ADV reveals whether it has the scale to write a meaningful check (AUM), whether it serves the client types that typically invest in funds (high-net-worth individuals, pooled investment vehicles, institutions), and where its decision-makers sit.

That is why GPs, placement agents, and IR teams treat Form ADV as a qualification layer. Rather than cold-emailing every adviser in a city, you can filter to firms above a size threshold that already advise the right kind of clients, then prioritize outreach. The filing is the signal; the introduction is the work. This lookup gives you the signal for free — search a name, scan the AUM and client counts, and open the detail page for the full registration record and a link to the original SEC filing.

Use it to research a specific adviser you’re about to meet, to build a target list of RIAs and family offices in a region, or simply to sanity-check the size of a firm before a call. Every result links to a dedicated page with the complete public record.