Private Equity Fund Size Distribution – Form D, Part 2

In a previous post, I looked at capital raises from 88,000 Form D filings from 2014 – 2016.

For this post, I mapped the distribution of fund sizes in 2016 from Form D filings (ignoring funds less than $5 million).

Although the fund size distribution is somewhat flatter than expected, there’s a definite concentration in the $100 – $250 million range and a steep drop off for funds with $1 billion or more. This is consistent with the private equity fund sizes we see in our database at www.PrivateEquityInfo.com (we don’t use Form D data in our database).

The next chart shows how this has changed over time, comparing the same 2016 data to 2015 and 2014.

Once again, this data shows the general trend of more funds and increasingly larger fund sizes.

2016 shows more funds in almost all fund size ranges. A notable exception is the $10 – $25 million range. We might infer from this graph that some firms moved up in fund size from prior years. For example, those funds that might have raised $10 – $25 million in previous years may have increased the offering to the $25 – $50 million range.