Private markets were long raised almost entirely from institutions. That is changing as registered investment advisers (RIAs) bring private equity, private credit and other strategies to their clients. Individual investors already hold about a fifth of private market assets, and that share is growing quickly. The question for managers raising capital is no longer whether RIAs have access to private markets. It is how access is delivered, who decides and how much capital flows.
This report follows RIAs along two paths into private markets: buying access to products others have built, or building vehicles of their own. The wealth of an RIA’s typical client, far more than the size of the firm, decides which path it takes. Firms serving mass-affluent clients mostly buy, through platforms and evergreen funds. Firms serving wealthier clients increasingly build, from a single in-house strategy up to endowment-style shelves of feeder funds. At the top, the paths are converging as RIAs launch evergreen funds of their own, and across the market consolidation is moving the decision to central investment teams.
Client wealth decides the path. The typical RIA serving clients with $25M or more keeps about 11% of its assets in private funds it sponsors, versus about 2% for firms serving $1–5M clients. The break comes once clients average roughly $5M, when they qualify for more private offerings and a firm can pool enough capital to build.
Buying is the main route for most of the market. Only about one in ten wealth managers builds its own vehicles. The rest rely on platforms and evergreen funds, a market that has grown to about $574B, led by private credit.
Builders move from running money to selecting managers. Smaller-client firms that build tend to run one in-house strategy. Wealthier-client firms build feeders into outside managers, and at the top they operate endowment-style shelves, mostly in private equity and hedge funds.
The two paths are converging. A growing group of RIAs is launching evergreen funds of their own, packaging their manager selection into a single vehicle built largely from other managers’ evergreen funds.
Consolidation is moving the decision to the home office. Most of the largest wealth managers are now owned by private equity or aggregators, and a single investment-committee approval can place a fund across many advisors.
The research and analysis in this report are powered entirely by Dakota Marketplace, the most comprehensive private markets database built for the institutional investment community. Dakota’s 60-plus person data team researched, verified, and maintained every data point referenced in these pages by hand, with real people who verify the information and update records with the rigor that institutional-grade intelligence demands. This report is the output. The database is the foundation.
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