Data sourced from Dakota Marketplace, the global LP and GP intelligence platform trusted by thousands of investment professionals. Learn More | Book a Demo
Individuals hold about a fifth of the roughly $14T in private market assets, and Morgan Stanley projects that share will reach 37% within five years.
Registered investment advisers (RIAs) sit at the center of that shift. They manage about $13.7T in Dakota’s data, and in KKR’s 2025 survey of larger RIAs, nearly half already allocate 10% or more of client assets to private markets.
For fund managers, the catch is that the RIA market is not just one market. Client wealth decides how a firm reaches private markets, and that changes where a manager has to win.
Why Client Wealth Decides the Path
Dakota’s RIA Report groups wealth managers into four tiers by the assets under management per typical client:
- Retail: under $1M per client
- Core: $1-5M per client
- HNW: $5-25M per client
- UHNW: $25M or more per client
The difference between tiers is large. The typical RIA serving clients with $25M or more keeps about 11% of its assets in private funds it sponsors.
Firms serving clients in the $1-5M range keep about 2%. The break comes once clients average roughly $5M, when they qualify for more private offerings and a firm can pool enough capital to build its own vehicles.
That pattern splits RIAs into buyers and builders, and it points to three distinct fundraising pools.
The Three Fundraising Pools
1. Build Awareness: Retail and Most Core Firms
This is the largest pool by number, with more than 5,000 firms, and the least developed. Few of these firms have vehicles of their own, and decisions often sit with individual advisors. Access usually runs through platforms.
For managers, education is the entry point, along with model portfolios and simpler, more liquid vehicles such as evergreen and interval funds. That market has grown quickly, to about $574B in net asset value across 588 evergreen funds. Retail and Core firms tend to adopt private markets through diversified building blocks that slot into existing models, so managers that package strategies with low minimums, simple reporting and broad diversification are better placed than those offering a single concentrated fund.
2. Scale Adoption: Upper Core and HNW Firms
These firms already understand private markets and are centralizing decisions in investment committees, but most do not want to build every piece of the operating stack themselves. A single approval can reach many advisors.
Marketplaces, feeders and onboarding tools make it easier for them to act, which is why this is the pool where combining platforms with proprietary vehicles matters most. Typical setups here include one to three feeder funds into outside managers. By the HNW tier, nearly four in five of the vehicles RIAs build invest with outside managers.
3. Deepen Allocation: UHNW Firms and Consolidated Platforms
About 90 UHNW firms, and a similar number of consolidated platforms, already run sizable programs. The challenge here is not awareness. It is earning a larger share of an established program.
That means competing on strategy breadth, larger commitments, co-investment and direct relationships. Ownership matters too. Backed firms run a median of four funds against two for independents, and their vehicles are more likely to invest with outside managers, so the investment team that curates the shelf is the audience.
The Segment Playbook
Here is how the four tiers compare:
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Retail
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Core
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HNW
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UHNW
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Role
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Buyer
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Emerging allocator
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Allocator
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Endowment-style CIO
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Main route
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Marketplaces, evergreen funds, listed BDCs
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Mostly buy; some access funds
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Own feeders plus marketplaces
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Own multi-asset shelf
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Likely decision-maker
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Advisor
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Firm or committee
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Investment committee
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CIO / investment team
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What resonates
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Simplicity and liquidity
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Portfolio integration
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Scalable institutional access
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Institutional-quality opportunity
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Where the Largest Untapped Opportunity Sits
The largest untapped opportunity is the middle of the market. Core wealth managers hold about 39% of RIA assets, but fewer than one in ten has private funds of its own, so few have built their own private markets infrastructure.
As those firms centralize their investment decisions, the gap between their scale and their private markets usage is likely to narrow. Managers that package strategies for how these firms already build portfolios will be well placed when it does.
Find the Right RIAs, and the Right Pool
Dakota Marketplace tracks 17,000+ RIAs and 46,000+ verified contacts across the global wealth channel, including CIO bios, investment preferences and 13F holdings, updated daily. Fundraising teams use it to see which tier a firm sits in, how it reaches private markets and who makes the decision, so outreach can match the pool instead of treating the channel as one market.
Book a demo to find the right RIAs for each fundraising pool in Dakota Marketplace.
