Methodology
Every investor in the directory comes from public records, and every fund, deal and partner on a profile links to the filing or page it came from. The directory lists 8,361 US investors; 2,935 of them are active, and 912 filed something new in the last 90 days. The data was last rebuilt in Oct 2026. This page explains where each field comes from.
Sources
- SEC Form D: the notice US companies and funds file when they raise money privately. We read the SEC’s quarterly data sets for the last 15 quarters. Filings marked as venture capital funds give us fund and deal vehicles (SPVs) and who sponsors them; other filings give us startup raises; the related persons on each filing give us named partners and startup board seats.
- SEC investment adviser reports: the SEC’s lists of registered and exempt reporting advisers, for a firm’s main office, phone number and website, and whether it is exempt as a venture capital adviser.
- Form ADV filings: the full filing archive the SEC publishes a few times a year, for officers and owners (Schedule A), declared websites including LinkedIn and X (Schedule D 1.I), and every private fund an adviser manages with its type, gross assets and number of investors (Schedule D 7.B.1).
- Y Combinator directory: the public company directory, via the open yc-oss mirror, for YC’s portfolio by batch and industry.
- Investors’ own websites: the homepage, plus the contact or pitch page when the homepage names no inbox (at most two requests per firm), for a stated thesis, sectors, stages, check size, pitch form, team inbox and social accounts.
Field by field
- Type: accelerators and corporate venture arms are recognised by name; an investor whose name is a person’s name is an angel; one whose vehicles are mostly series of a master fund (the usual SPV-platform structure), or whose name says angels, syndicate or collective, is a syndicate; everything else is a venture firm.
- Location: the main office on the SEC adviser record when there is one, otherwise the most common address on the investor’s Form D filings (the registered-agent and filing-platform addresses many vehicles use are ignored), otherwise its partners’ addresses.
- Sectors: counted from the industries of the startups it backs (Form D industry group, YC industry), words in its fund and deal-vehicle names, and its website, which counts double. Sectors with too little evidence are dropped.
- Stages: what its website says, when it says. Otherwise angels, syndicates and accelerators count as pre-seed and seed, and venture firms are placed by fund size, from the latest fund on Form D or the largest venture fund on Form ADV (under $60M: pre-seed and seed; under $200M: seed and Series A; under $600M: seed to Series B; under $1.5B: Series A to growth; larger: Series B and growth; advisers with eight or more venture funds and one over $1B: seed to growth), plus any stage it has joined at least twice, judged by round size (under $1.5M pre-seed, under $6M seed, under $25M Series A, under $70M Series B).
- Check size: what its website states, when it does. Otherwise, for angels and syndicates, the middle range (20th to 80th percentile) of their SPV sizes; for funds, about 1 to 3% of the latest fund’s size on Form D or of the largest venture fund on Form ADV. These are estimates; we hide a range when its top is more than 25 times its bottom or above $100M.
- Assets under management: the gross assets of the private funds on the adviser’s latest Form ADV, dated as of that filing.
- People: fund executives named on Form D filings, and officers and owners from Form ADV Schedule A, with compliance-only roles listed last.
- Contact routes: only inboxes, pitch forms and social accounts the investor publishes on its own website or declares to the SEC.
What “active” means
An investor’s last activity is the latest date it filed a new Form D notice for one of its funds or deal vehicles (amendments don’t count), or the date a startup listing one of its partners as a director first filed Form D. It is active when that date falls in the last 12 months. Listings show active investors only, ordered by how many new vehicles and board seats they had in those 12 months. Investors with no recent filing keep their profile, reachable from the A to Z index.
Startup directors named on a company’s Form D are not listed as investors in their own right; a board seat counts only toward the firm the director is a partner at. Lists with fewer than 8 active investors stay available but are kept out of search engines.
Limits
Form D only covers raises that file one, and filings can be late, amended or vague about who invested. Angels writing personal checks rarely file anything, so they are under-represented. Sector, stage and check size are inferences from the evidence above, not statements by the investor unless their website says so. Nothing here is investment advice.
Refresh
The data is rebuilt monthly. Each rebuild fetches the two newest Form D quarters again (the SEC revises them), the latest adviser reports, the Form ADV archive when the SEC posts a new one, and the YC directory, and re-reads investor websites last fetched more than 30 days earlier. Each profile shows when its data was last refreshed.
Corrections and removal
If a profile is about you or your firm and is wrong, or you want it taken down, use the removal and correction form. We act within a few business days, and a removed profile stays removed after every later rebuild. Questions about the data: support@zinvestorhunting.com.