The Long View
Most VC market commentary is based on surveys, self-reported data, or aggregated deal databases that cover the top 100 firms. SEC Form D data is different: it captures every registered fund raise, from emerging managers to established mega-funds.
Here's what 15 years of quarterly filings reveal.
2009–2014: Recovery and Rebuild
Post-financial crisis, VC fundraising was subdued. The average fund raised in 2010 was under $50M. The number of new fund entities filing Form D each quarter hovered around 200–300.
By 2013, the market had recovered to pre-crisis levels. Andreessen Horowitz — founded in 2009 — was already on its second fund. Benchmark, Sequoia, and Accel were raising on regular 3-year cycles.
2015–2019: The Age of Scale
This period saw the emergence of truly large "opportunity funds" and growth vehicles alongside the traditional early-stage fund. SoftBank's Vision Fund ($100B, filed in 2017) is the clearest outlier, but the trend toward larger funds was broad-based.
The median fund size for established managers roughly doubled between 2015 and 2019. More importantly, new entrants were raising at scale too — solo GPs with rolling fund structures, microVCs filing $10–30M vehicles, and corporate VCs formalizing their programs.
2020–2021: Peak Euphoria
2021 stands as the clearest peak in the Form D data. Both fund count and total capital raised hit all-time highs in Q3 2021. Median check sizes were up. New entity filings were up. First-time managers raised more easily than at any point in the dataset.
The macroeconomic context is obvious in retrospect: near-zero rates, strong public markets, and FOMO compressing LP decision timelines.
2022–2024: The Reset
Rising rates hit venture hard. The number of new fund filings dropped sharply starting in Q2 2022. The most pronounced effect: smaller funds (sub-$50M) essentially disappeared from the filing stream for 18+ months as micro-VCs struggled to raise.
Established firms — those with 3+ funds on record in our dataset — held up better. They raised slightly smaller funds in 2023–2024 than 2021, but the gap isn't as dramatic as the macro narrative suggests.
What to Watch
The leading indicator we track is new entity filings: first-time managers with no prior Form D history. This cohort tends to compress when LP capital is scarce and expand when it's abundant. As of the most recent data, it's recovering — which historically precedes broader market activity by 2–3 quarters.