Data sourced from Dakota Marketplace, the global LP and GP intelligence platform trusted by thousands of investment professionals. Learn More | Book a Demo
Fundraising and raising capital is hard. Dakota makes it easier.
At Dakota, our mission is simple: make fundraising easier for investment sales teams. Dakota Marketplace is the only database built, used, and updated by fundraisers just like you, and we're constantly evolving it to help you spend less time researching and more time closing.
This August, we released a handful of updates: a new Conference Speakers tab, decoded RIA ownership data from Form ADV, direct Outlook integration, a new Will Co-Invest field on investment firm pages, and expanded benchmarking data for hedge funds and 1Q26.
Top New Features Added to Dakota Marketplace in August
1. Conference Speakers Tab
We've launched a new Conference Speakers tab in Dakota Marketplace, giving fundraisers a centralized, filterable view of 780+ speakers across upcoming and past conferences. Users can search and filter by conference name, speaker name, account, metro area, date, investment focus, and format, toggle between upcoming and past speakers, and save their own speaker lists. Every speaker record links back to the underlying contact, and every contact page now includes a Conferences related list showing every event that person has spoken at or will speak at.
Fundraisers often build city schedules and event calendars based on who is speaking where, but that data used to require opening one conference record at a time. The new tab surfaces it as a single, searchable database, so you can see which speakers and firms are converging on a given metro area before booking travel.
2. RIA Ownership from Form ADV
On Form ADV, RIAs must disclose the individuals or entities holding ownership stakes in the firm, reported using lettered codes ranging from less than 5% to 75% and above. Dakota Marketplace now decodes these codes and displays them directly on Form ADV owner records, with 13,700+ contacts currently identified as ownership stakeholders and more being matched over time.
The RIA M&A space continues to heat up, and buyers using Marketplace for cold outreach can now target the individuals who actually hold ownership in a firm rather than the broader contact base. Combined with existing signals like number of accounts, number of clients, % of HNW client base, and AUM per client, ownership data helps evaluate both a firm's health and who owns it. The largest owner is often an LLC holding 75% or more, but this feature lets you look past that structure and identify the individual analysts and partners who hold smaller, but real, stakes worth tracking.
Want to see this feature live? Book a demo of Dakota Marketplace.
3. Outlook Integration
Users can now connect their Outlook account directly to Dakota Marketplace, send emails to contacts straight from the platform, and have those messages sync back to Outlook automatically. This closes a workflow gap fundraisers have raised for a while: users didn't want to jump between Marketplace and their inbox just to reach out to a contact.
Now the outreach and the record-keeping happen in one place, with no copy-paste step. Unlike the previous email functionality that required a tech team to set up, the new Outlook integration connects in a few clicks with no IT ticket required.
Other Releases
Will Co-Invest Field
Investment Firm pages now include a new field titled Will Co-Invest, sitting on the General Information tab just below Offers Co-Invest. The distinction matters: Offers Co-Invest identifies firms that offer co-investment opportunities to their LPs, while Will Co-Invest surfaces firms that will invest as LPs into other funds or direct deals. Sourced from Form ADV filings, Part 2A Brochures, and historical data, the field is currently populated for over 400 investment firms and growing. Traditionally GPs seek capital and LPs provide it, but this field surfaces the GPs that also have an outward-facing investing function, expanding a fundraiser's addressable universe and making it easier to identify who to approach when a fund needs to close a deal.
Hedge Fund Benchmarking and Dakota Benchmarks 1Q26 Refresh
Two benchmarking updates went live in August. New benchmarking data for hedge fund strategies is now available across the platform, adding another asset class to Dakota Benchmarks and giving hedge fund managers a like-for-like comparison against peer strategies. Separately, 1Q26 performance data has been added to Marketplace, refreshing Performance and Dakota Benchmarks for the new quarter so fundraisers are pitching allocators on current data, not the last cycle's.
See What These Features Can Do for Your Team
These updates were built in direct response to what fundraisers told us they needed most. And we're just getting started. Every August release was designed to remove a specific point of friction, whether that means seeing who's speaking where before you book travel, connecting your inbox to your data, or evaluating firms with a fuller picture. More updates across AI, data depth, and platform integrations are already in development.
Book a demo of Dakota Marketplace to see how these features can help your team raise capital more efficiently.
