Every fund vehicle registered in the last 12 months is a candidate. Every ADV-registered private-fund advisor is a candidate. Every family office we can identify — a candidate. The quant end of the hedge-fund world is not: they run their own pipelines on raw XBRL and Bloomberg feeds and don't want narrative-shaped data. The interesting question is what remains once you strip them out and stop double-counting fund vehicles versus their management companies. We can count all of it from the substrate.
Grouping SEC Form D filings by fund type + activity. Each row is filings in the last 12 months, tallied as distinct fund vehicles (~1 per Form D) and distinct CIKs (proxy for management company, though many management companies operate several CIKs — real firm count is typically 60–75% of the CIK count).
| Fund type | Distinct fund vehicles (12mo) | Distinct CIKs (12mo) | Est. mgmt firms | MCP fit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Venture Capital Fund | 9,286 | 9,285 | ~6,500 | strong — need portfolio & co-investor lookup |
| Private Equity Fund | 5,858 | 5,858 | ~4,000 | strong — target sourcing + M&A comp |
| Other Investment Fund | 4,538 | 4,536 | ~3,000 | strong — crossover / late-stage crossovers |
| Hedge Fund | 1,776 | 1,776 | ~1,200 | mixed — split into fundamental (yes) vs quant (no) |
Form D counts every fund vehicle. ADV counts the management company. This is the more honest firm-count number: 7,261 total ADV-registered private-fund advisors with a stated top fund type. Also worth noting the aggregate RAUM per type — this is the pool of assets these firms are managing today.
| Top fund type | RIA firms | Aggregate RAUM ($T) | Avg firm RAUM | MCP demand |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hedge Fund | 2,896 | $26.2T | $9.0B | Fundamental-shop half: high. Quant half: low. |
| Private Equity Fund | 2,290 | $16.6T | $7.3B | Target sourcing, comps, exit tracking — high |
| Other Private Fund | 957 | $22.2T | $23.2B | Crossover funds, mostly high |
| Real Estate Fund | 556 | $4.1T | $7.4B | reit vertical serves them; high |
| Venture Capital Fund | 348 | $0.95T | $2.7B | Brand-name VCs; smaller VCs go ERA |
| Securitized Asset Fund | 201 | $6.3T | $31.3B | Mostly structured product shops — low |
For the MCP thesis specifically, size matters. Firms managing under $100M can't afford enterprise data. Firms managing over $10B have their own data-engineering teams and mostly build in-house. The $100M – $10B RAUM band is 17,312 RIAs and it's the exact segment PitchBook and Preqin under-serve (both expensive; both priced for enterprise buyers).
| RAUM band | RIA firms | MCP fit |
|---|---|---|
| < $100M | 3,772 | no — priced out; use free tools |
| $100M – $1B | 12,601 | sweet spot — can pay, need the data, no eng team |
| $1B – $10B | 4,711 | sweet spot — same, at higher price point |
| > $10B | 1,407 | maybe — have their own data teams already |
Family offices are the market segment PitchBook and Preqin miss most because family offices actively avoid registration (Family Office Rule exemption). We can identify 444 via ADV name-match ("family office" / "family capital" / "multi family" in the RIA name) and another 235 via Form D name-match. Of the ADV-visible 444, 70 report RAUM > $100M and 24 report RAUM > $1B — those 24 are the mega-single-family-offices (SFOs of Bloomberg / Zuckerberg / Ellison / etc. scale).
Real family-office universe is 3–5× what we can see because most single-family offices choose NOT to register at all (Family Office Rule exempts them if they only serve one family). Industry estimates put the US SFO count at 3,000–5,000. Add multi-family offices (roughly 200 major, several hundred smaller) and the true addressable pool is likely 3,500–6,000 firms.
Family offices are unusually good MCP prospects because: (a) they're generalist investors who need private-market + M&A + investor data + person data + ADV all in one place, (b) they don't have data-eng teams, (c) they can pay real prices ($20-50K+/yr common for boutique data services), (d) they don't buy PitchBook because it's overpriced for their use case.
Kee's point holds: quant / systematic shops don't want narrative-shaped data. They want normalized time series, raw XBRL, and pricing feeds — and they build the pipeline themselves. Named firms to exclude from any prospect list:
| Firm | RAUM ($B) | Type |
|---|---|---|
| PGIM Quantitative Solutions | 111.0 | Other Private Fund |
| Quantinno Capital Management | 60.9 | Hedge Fund |
| Blackstone Credit Systematic Strategies | 35.7 | PE Fund |
| Systematica Investments | 23.8 | Hedge Fund |
| Trexquant Investment | 13.5 | Hedge Fund |
| Quantbot Technologies | 6.7 | Hedge Fund |
Also excluded even though not named "quant" / "systematic": Renaissance, DE Shaw, Two Sigma, Citadel, Millennium, Point72, Jane Street, Susquehanna, Hudson River Trading, Jump Trading, Virtu, Tower Research, Optiver, IMC, Flow Traders. Combined these ~15 shops manage another ~$1T that shows up in ADV under `top_fund_type='Hedge Fund'` but is definitionally NOT the MCP target.
Real firms who filed new fund vehicles in Q2 2026. Each row is a live-active prospect for an MCP-server pitch:
| Fund vehicle | Type | Offering ($B) | Filed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spark Capital Growth Fund VI | VC | 1.95 | Apr 2 |
| Kleiner Perkins Select IV + XXII | VC | 2.92 | Apr 7 |
| Altimeter Premier Growth Expansion Fund | VC | 1.50 | Jun 23 |
| Addition Six | VC | 1.50 | Jun 16 |
| Benchmark Partners T1 | VC | 1.25 | Jun 30 |
| Diffusion ONE | VC (AI) | 1.00 | Jun 22 |
| Third Rock Ventures VII | VC | 0.75 | Jun 3 |
| Volition Capital Fund VI | VC | 0.88 | Jun 4 |
Each of these is a new fund with fresh capital, hunting for deals, needing to understand who's writing what checks and who's exiting where. The MCP-tool pitch to any of them: "your associates can ask MARS a question in plain English — 'show me all AI infrastructure Series B raises where Sequoia was NOT the lead' — and get a structured answer back, without paying $80K/yr for PitchBook enterprise." That's the shape.
Adding it up with realistic filters (no double-counting fund vehicles vs mgmt firms; excluding quant; adding family-office adjustments; excluding sub-$100M RIAs that can't pay and mega-$10B+ firms that build in-house):
| Segment | Firms | Est. willingness-to-pay ($K/yr) | Annualized ceiling ($M) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fundamental hedge funds ($100M – $10B AUM) | ~1,500 | 10–30 | 30 |
| PE firms (all sizes, mid-market focus) | ~1,800 | 15–40 | 50 |
| VC firms (brand + ERA tail combined) | ~4,500 | 5–20 | 45 |
| Family offices (SFO + MFO, addressable) | ~2,500 | 15–50 | 75 |
| Other private-fund managers (crossovers etc.) | ~800 | 15–40 | 20 |
| Total SAM | ~11,100 | $220M/yr |
The MCP catalog is already there (funding-vertical shipped July, mergers vertical live on argos-mcp-server, sedar live for Canadian resource, donor family for wealth research). The 2026-Q2 mega-fund filers above are the highest-signal warm-list because they just closed capital and are about to deploy — they need target sourcing yesterday.
Family offices are the segment where MCP has no incumbent competition worth naming. PitchBook targets institutional buyers; Preqin targets LP-facing GPs; the family office CIO with a small team and generalist mandate is under-served everywhere.
The pipeline sequence to prove the thesis: (1) ship 5-10 mid-market VC/PE trial accounts through 2026 H2 to validate willingness-to-pay in the $10-20K range, (2) close 2-3 marquee family-office accounts at $30-50K each to establish that pricing tier, (3) publish 2-3 case studies. Then scale.