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It’s August already. How did that happen?! 

But before the schools go back, and we enter the home stretch of the year, we wanted to do a half-year check-in to see what the state of the market is in terms of capital raising in the US private funds industry so far in 2025.

That means Form D filings. And the headline is that the numbers are up.

The first half of last year saw 6,886 Form D filings submitted to the SEC between January 1st and June 30th, good for a total dollar value of $166.7bn.* Of those, 661 were hedge funds ($65bn), 1,926 were private equity funds ($40.1bn), 2,981 were venture capital funds ($12.9bn), and 1,318 were ‘other’ investment funds ($48.7bn).

But this year, 7,571 filings were submitted in H1, an increase of 10%; but the increase in the aggregate total amount sold - $222.5bn in the first half this year - represents a huge 33.5% uplift from last year’s $166.7bn.

It is a similar story at the category level. Table 1 below shows that, for the main pooled investment fund categories available to filers on the Form D, both the number of filings and the total sales were up year on year.

Table 1: Form D Filings, January – June, 2024, 2025

*We use the Total Amount Sold on Form D to estimate the amount raised in dollars.

Many have been commenting about the challenges that new hedge funds face to raise assets for years, but now, it appears that they are back, with the category delivering not only the highest total sales value in the first half of this year, but given the category also has the lowest number of filings on aggregate, the highest average size as well.

The numbers don’t paint the whole picture, either, because not every filer discloses their sales on the initial Form D.

Some funds file it proactively — for example, if the first subscription hasn't settled yet, or if they're setting everything up in anticipation of imminent fundraising. In these cases, they may list $0 sold or leave the sales data blank because they haven't received any subscriptions yet, so there's genuinely nothing to report.

But the cynic would say that optics play a significant role. If a fund launches, makes a few early sales, files a Form D showing a tiny amount raised — and then fails to raise more over the next year — that filing becomes a kind of public scarlet letter. It says, “We tried… and got nowhere.” And that's not a good look for a fund trying to build momentum or impress prospective investors.

So instead of putting “$1m raised,” they might just file early, leave the sales amount blank or at zero, and quietly update it later (or not at all) with an amended Form D once there’s a respectable number to show — or avoid updating it if the raise goes nowhere.

Anyway, despite the hedge fund category roaring back in the first half of 2025, it is the private markets folks which dominate the ‘league table’ of the largest filers. That should come as no surprise, as it usually takes a lot more money to buy a company than take a position in the stock market.  

So, which firms or funds have been gobbling up the money so far this year? Table 2 below shows the dominance of the private equity and ‘other’ categories in the multi-billion-dollar market.

Table 2: Largest Form D Filings, Jan-June 2025, by Category and Total Amount Sold

Reasons for the growth in the private fund market in the US can’t be derived from the data, but the three interest rate cuts by the US Fed between September and December last year likely have had a positive impact on new fund launches in the first half of this year, as investors rotate away from the ‘flavor-of-the-month of recent times’ liquid fixed income investments into alternatives.  

But for those in the private funds market, a 10% increase in the total number of filings, and an increase in dollars allocated of one-third – remember, that’s a minimum one-third due to the zero sales reported in some instances – the numbers from the first six months of 2025 will be most encouraging. 

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