Tony Wang13 min readPitchBook's Own Public Catalog: Accelerators Beat VCs, Buyout Beat Venture
We read 1.4M+ PitchBook company profiles. Accelerators out-invest VC firms, buyout funds out-boomed venture in 2022–23, and the 'graveyard' isn't evenly spread.
PitchBook is the standard reference for who's investing in what — but almost everyone who cites it is reading a single profile page behind a login wall. Nobody had aggregated PitchBook's own public catalog and asked what it says in bulk. So we did: every public company, investor, fund, advisor and limited-partner profile PitchBook exposes without a subscription — 1.4M+ companies, 120,863 investors, 135,811 funds — read through a structured API and rolled up into one dataset.
What came back cuts against three things people assume about private capital: that the most prolific investors are VC firms, that the 2020–23 fundraising boom was a venture-specific ZIRP story, and that "half of PitchBook's companies are dead or acquired" means the same thing in every industry.
The most "active" investors aren't VC firms — they're accelerators and a government agency
Sort the entire 120,863-investor catalog by portfolio_count and the leaderboard isn't Sequoia, a16z or Benchmark. It's accelerator programs — and one national government agency:
Of the top 15 by portfolio size, only 3 are conventional VC firms — Gaingels (#10), Antler (#13), Alumni Ventures (#15). The rest are accelerator programs (Plug and Play, Y Combinator, Techstars, Google Accelerator, MassChallenge, Creative Destruction Lab, 500 Global) or public agencies (Innovate UK, the US National Science Foundation, South Korea's Tech Incubator Program, India's Startup Haryana, the EU's European Innovation Council).
That's not a fluke of how PitchBook classifies "investor" — it's structural. An accelerator runs dozens of companies through a cohort every few months and keeps a stake in each; a government innovation program funds hundreds of grants a year. A VC firm, even a prolific one, closes maybe 20–40 new deals annually. Over a decade, program-style investing simply outputs more portfolio line items than deal-by-deal VC does — PitchBook's catalog just makes that arithmetic visible for the first time.
Zoom out to the investor-type level and the same pattern holds: Angels (43,112) are the single largest investor-type bucket, ahead of VC firms (37,165) — individual angel investors, not institutional funds, are PitchBook's most common investor type by a wide margin. And 21.3% of investor profiles with a status field (18,443 of 86,714) are flagged Inactive — a real churn rate behind the marquee names.
Show investor types and status, full breakdown
| Investor type | Count | Share of catalog |
|---|---|---|
| Angel | 43,112 | 35.7% |
| Venture Capital | 37,165 | 30.8% |
| PE/Buyout | 15,973 | 13.2% |
| Accelerator/Incubator | 11,887 | 9.8% |
| Growth/Expansion | 4,171 | 3.5% |
| Angel Group | 2,335 | 1.9% |
| Strategic Acquirer | 1,161 | 1.0% |
| Family Office | 1,110 | 0.9% |
Fund formation, year by year: buyout out-boomed venture in the pandemic era
The standard story about 2020–23 is a venture-specific one — ZIRP, retail hype, everyone starting a fund. Bisecting PitchBook's fund catalog by vintage year tells a broader story:
Venture fund formation climbed from 380 funds/yr (2000–04) to a peak of 4,644/yr in 2022–23 — a +43.5% jump over the immediately preceding 2017–19 window (3,236/yr). That's the number people usually cite as evidence of the VC boom. But buyout/PE fund formation went from 949/yr (2017–19) to 1,969/yr in 2022–23 — a +107.5% jump, more than double venture's percentage acceleration over the same baseline. Both strategies then cooled by roughly the same proportion in 2024–25: venture fell 33% off its peak (back near 2017–19 levels), buyout fell 36% off its peak (still above 2017–19).
The mechanism reads the same either way — ZIRP-era capital searching for a home, LPs flush with cash chasing any private-markets allocation — but the popular framing pins it on startup mania specifically. PitchBook's own catalog says buyout funds proliferated at least as fast, likely faster, during the exact same window.
The "48% acquired" number isn't PitchBook's — and it isn't even
Roll up every company's status across the full 1,438,997-company catalog and 45.7% are already Acquired/Merged — more than the 42.9% still Private. Only 3.1% are Public, and 8.2% are flagged Out of Business. Read as a single number, PitchBook's public catalog looks less like a startup directory and more like a graveyard: for every company still private, another has already been bought, merged, or shut down.
But that number is an average across radically different industries. Split it by primary_industry and the range runs from 27% to 90%:
64,123 of 71,360 companies — almost the entire industry has already sold
37,690 of 66,151 companies
656,953 of 1,438,997 companies
27,053 of 100,212 companies — the largest single industry, 60.5% still Private
Buildings and Property is 89.9% Acquired/Merged — real-estate-adjacent services consolidate almost completely; there's barely an industry left to be "private" in. Business/Productivity Software — the single largest industry in the whole catalog at 100,212 companies — is only 27.0% acquired, with 60.5% still Private. Software companies simply stay independent far longer than property-services businesses do. The "graveyard" headline is real, but it's concentrated: it describes real estate and adjacent commercial services far more than it describes the software industry that dominates the catalog by sheer count.
We can trace an investor's portfolio to real outcomes — PitchBook doesn't publish this itself
Every investor and fund profile in the catalog carries an Investments table with row-level references to the actual portfolio companies — not just a name, a resolvable ID. That means you can chain from "who invested" to "what happened to the company" without leaving the dataset, something PitchBook's own product doesn't surface as a metric.
We proved it works on one real investor. Audeo Ventures, a Dubai-based early-stage VC founded in 2021, lists 19 investments. Resolving three of its portfolio companies by ID:
| Portfolio company | Current status | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Corgi | Private | Still operating, Series B2, $405M raised |
| Monite | Acquired/Merged | Acquired by OakNorth Bank, 2026-03-11 |
| X1 Card | Acquired/Merged | Acquired by Robinhood, 2023-06-22 |
Two of three checked had already exited to an acquisition. That's a single worked example, not a statistical claim about Audeo Ventures or any other investor — but it demonstrates the join is real and computable. Scaled to, say, the top-15 investors by portfolio size from the section above, this could answer a genuinely novel question: which investors' portfolios skew toward acquisition vs. still-private vs. Out of Business? That's a full batch job (hundreds of chained lookups), not something we ran at scale here — but the mechanism works today, on live data, for free.
Two smaller patterns worth a footnote
Limited partners, by institution count, lean Foundations — not pension funds. Of ~34,560 LP profiles, Foundations lead at 7,313, ahead of Corporate Pensions (5,569), Wealth Management Firms (3,276) and Investment Advisors (3,153); Public Pension Funds sit further down at 1,601. This cuts against the "pension funds are the biggest LPs" media narrative — but that narrative is usually about dollars committed, which this public catalog doesn't carry a field for. By institution count, Foundations lead; by dollars, pension funds may well still dominate. Both can be true.
Show the LP institution-type breakdown
| Institution type | Count |
|---|---|
| Foundation | 7,313 |
| Corporate Pension | 5,569 |
| Wealth Management Firm | 3,276 |
| Investment Advisor | 3,153 |
| Insurance Company | 2,616 |
| Public Pension Fund | 1,601 |
US state concentration flips its #2/#3 spot between investors and companies. Both lead with California (investors 7,571; companies 86,531 — no surprise there). But investors rank New York #2 (4,895) ahead of Texas #3 (2,307), while companies rank Texas #2 (41,415) ahead of New York #3 (38,742). Reads as consistent with New York's finance/investor-HQ concentration versus Texas's broader non-VC company base (energy, real estate, industrials) — a small, real, checkable divergence.
How we did this, and the caveats
We pulled every record through Crawlora's structured PitchBook dataset — companies, investors, funds, advisors and limited partners, all discovered from PitchBook's own public sitemap, the free profile pages any visitor can view without a subscription. Every number above reconciles against its own facet or search total field, not an estimate.
Caveats worth stating plainly: this is PitchBook's public catalog, not its licensed core product — coverage is whatever PitchBook exposes publicly plus what the crawl discovered, not a random or complete sample of the private-capital universe. The LP-by-institution-count figure isn't a claim about dollars/AUM, which this dataset doesn't carry. The fund-size figures are a 10-fund spot check, not a real distribution. The industry cross-cut covers 3 of roughly 50 primary_industry values — the 3 largest — not an exhaustive per-industry breakdown. The cross-index join (investor → company → outcome) is a single worked example (n=3 companies), not a statistical claim about exit rates. And every count here reflects a live pull on 2026-08-25 — this catalog is actively growing as PitchBook's public sitemap gets re-crawled, so a re-pull months from now will likely show different totals.
| Dataset | Total records | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| Companies | 1,438,997 | Status split, industry cross-cut |
| Investors | 120,863 | Top-by-portfolio, investor type, status, geography |
| Funds | 135,811 | Vintage-year fund formation, fund size spot-check |
| Limited partners | ~34,560 | Institution-type breakdown |
| Advisors | ~90,415 | Referenced for catalog scale (not separately charted) |
If you want to run your own cuts on this data — by industry, by geography, by investor type, joined against companies or funds — that's exactly what the PitchBook dataset API is for. It's the same structured-data approach behind our Airbnb, Product Hunt, and anti-bot studies: normalized JSON instead of a login wall.
Query PitchBook's public catalog directly
Crawlora's PitchBook dataset turns 1.4M+ company, investor, fund, advisor and LP profiles into structured, queryable JSON — filter, facet, and join across all five, no PitchBook subscription needed. 2,000 free credits a month, no card.
Frequently asked questions
Who are PitchBook's most prolific investors by portfolio size?
Not VC firms. Sorted by current portfolio company count across PitchBook's public 120,863-investor catalog, the leaders are accelerator programs and government agencies: Plug and Play Tech Center (5,241 portfolio companies), Y Combinator (4,316), Innovate UK — a UK government innovation agency (4,243), the US National Science Foundation (3,547), and Techstars (3,466). Only 3 of the top 15 are conventional VC firms — Gaingels, Antler, and Alumni Ventures.
Did venture or buyout/PE fund formation grow faster during the 2020-23 boom?
Buyout, in percentage terms. Bisecting PitchBook's fund catalog by vintage year, venture fund formation rose from 3,236 funds/yr (2017-19) to a 2022-23 peak of 4,644/yr, a 43.5% jump. Buyout fund formation rose from 949/yr to 1,969/yr over the same window — a 107.5% jump, more than double venture's percentage acceleration. The popular narrative pins the pandemic-era fundraising boom on venture/ZIRP-fueled startup mania specifically; PitchBook's own catalog shows buyout grew proportionally faster.
What share of PitchBook's companies have been acquired?
45.7% (656,953 of 1,438,997) carry status Acquired/Merged, versus 42.9% still Private, 8.2% Out of Business, and 3.1% Public. But that split isn't uniform: Buildings and Property is 89.9% acquired, while Business/Productivity Software — the single largest industry in the catalog at 100,212 companies — is only 27.0% acquired, with 60.5% still Private.
Are angel investors or VC firms more common on PitchBook?
Angels. Angel investors (43,112) are the single largest investor-type bucket in PitchBook's public investor catalog, ahead of Venture Capital firms (37,165). About 21.3% of investor profiles with a status field (18,443 of 86,714) are flagged Inactive.
Does PitchBook's public data include fund size or AUM?
Sparsely. A fund_size field does exist on some public fund profiles — a 10-fund spot check found values from $321M to $7.1B across vintage years, roughly 40% populated — but the public API has no facet, sort, or filter on it, so a real distribution would require sampling hundreds to thousands of individual fund records.
Are pension funds really the biggest limited partners?
Not by institution count in PitchBook's public LP catalog. Of about 34,560 limited-partner profiles, Foundations lead at 7,313, ahead of Corporate Pensions (5,569), Wealth Management Firms (3,276), and Investment Advisors (3,153); Public Pension Funds sit further down at 1,601. This is a count-of-institutions figure, not a claim about dollars committed — the 'pensions dominate' narrative is usually about AUM, which this public catalog doesn't carry a field for.