Last updated: August 2026
Every capital partner asks a deal-by-deal sponsor the same question, usually in the first ten minutes. Why is this deal yours? A committed fund answers with an origination team and years of banker relationships. A sponsor without a fund answers with a thesis and a list. If the list came off a marketplace, everyone else looking at it is pricing the same company off the same broker's number, and the family office you're pitching probably saw it last month.
Scouly is a screen for building the other kind of list. It tracks 173,769 companies across 7 verticals from SBA 7(a) and 504 FOIA loan files, PPP loan data, DOL Form 5500 filings, state business registries, UK Companies House and OpenStreetMap establishment density. Nothing on it is for sale. Every company carries a deterministic 0 to 100 score built from loan maturity, registry longevity and local fragmentation, with the source records linked on the profile so a partner can audit the reasoning instead of taking your word for it.
Buy-and-build math needs a trade area that holds a platform and enough credible add-ons behind it to keep buying. Pick the wrong metro and you own a decent business with nothing to bolt onto it, which turns a platform thesis into a single-asset hold nobody underwrote. So the question at the front of a search is how many independent operators of the right size live inside one drive time. That count is a public number if you assemble it. The long-form argument for reading it this way is in market fragmentation as a roll-up sourcing signal.
Across Scouly's seven live verticals, here is how the tracked companies land across metro markets:
| Vertical | Companies in tracked metros | Metros covered | Average per metro |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manufacturing | 45,096 | 431 | 105 |
| Dental | 26,563 | 431 | 62 |
| Auto repair | 23,078 | 433 | 53 |
| HVAC and plumbing | 20,259 | 430 | 47 |
| Landscaping | 10,585 | 409 | 26 |
| Veterinary | 8,884 | 426 | 21 |
| Funeral homes | 3,384 | 384 | 9 |
Manufacturing is the deepest by a wide margin and dental sits second at 62 per metro. Los Angeles holds 2,394 tracked manufacturers, Chicago 2,089, Houston 1,309, Detroit 1,292, Minneapolis-St. Paul 1,140. Contract shops, fabricators, machine shops, mostly owner-operated. None of them are listed for sale on Scouly.
HVAC and plumbing runs thinner per metro and stacks up in a handful of dense ones. New York-Newark-Jersey City holds 1,536 tracked firms, more than double the next metro on the list. The trades also carry add-on logic a backer can underwrite without a consultant: shared dispatch and one back office instead of four. Browse every combination on the Markets index.
Registry longevity is what picks the platform. A firm registered in the 1980s under the same ownership has traded through every downturn since, and it holds the customer relationships an add-on program gets bolted onto. Formation dates come from state registries and Companies House. They're the cheapest durability proxy you can get before an NDA.
SBA loan maturity is what times the approach. A 7(a) or 504 loan carries a term you read straight off the FOIA file, so a borrower nearing payoff on a ten-year facility, with no partner listed in the entity, sits at a natural decision point. That's when a letter gets read. The buyer's version of the argument is in SBA loan data as an acquisition-timing signal.
Fragmentation sizes the pipeline sitting behind the platform, and it tells you whether a consolidator already took the add-ons.
A capital partner gets something concrete out of that. A named platform candidate with a count of add-on candidates inside the same trade area, plus a reason this year is when the owner picks up the phone. Build yours in the thesis builder.
Scouly never estimates revenue or EBITDA. No public source reports either one for a private company, and any tool that prints an earnings figure for a machine shop in Toledo generated that figure. What the records support is a size band and a floor on deal size. PPP loan amounts encode payroll. Form 5500 filings report participant counts, the closest public proxy for headcount. SBA loan amounts show what a bank was willing to underwrite against the business. The honest method, with error bars stated at every step, is in estimating business value from public records.
For sizing, the SBA distributions are the anchor. Across the 7(a) and 504 files Scouly counts 16,487 manufacturing borrowers, median peak loan $558,000, 25th percentile $300,000, 75th percentile $1,140,000, with 30% above $1M. HVAC and plumbing runs smaller: 6,366 borrowers, $380,000 median, 19% above $1M. Those are loan sizes and never valuations. Test a number against them in the deal benchmark tool.
Scouly screens. Everything from the owner's first reply onward is your diligence and your LOI.
Explorer is free and includes 10 full profile unlocks, enough to sanity-check a metro before you commit a quarter to it. Operator is $35 a month with unlimited unlocks. Scouly never contacts owners, and it's neither a marketplace nor a broker. Coverage detail lives on the data page, and sponsors working alongside an operator-searcher may want the self-funded searcher page.
How do independent sponsors find proprietary deal flow? By building the target list before a process exists. State registries give formation dates, SBA FOIA files give loan history and maturity, PPP and Form 5500 give size bands, and establishment density gives fragmentation. Rank a metro's operators on those and write to the owners directly. Slower than a marketplace, and it produces deals nobody else is bidding on.
How do you pick a platform company without seeing financials? Use durability and structure instead of earnings. Registry age shows survival across cycles, an SBA loan shows a bank already underwrote the business, a Form 5500 filing gives a participant count, and the count of similar firms in the metro shows whether add-ons exist. That's enough to decide who gets a letter. Financials arrive once the owner replies.
Which industries are most fragmented for a buy-and-build? In Scouly's tracked data, manufacturing averages 105 companies per metro across 431 metros, dental 62 across 431, and auto repair 53 across 433. Each of those puts hundreds of owner-run firms inside a single metro, which is the density a platform-plus-add-on plan needs. Funeral homes sit at the far end with 9 per metro, so death-care roll-ups have to run across state lines.
Can public records estimate a company's EBITDA? No. Private US small companies publish no earnings anywhere, and Scouly refuses to guess at them. Public records support a payroll-derived size band, a headcount figure where a Form 5500 exists, and a floor on deal size from what a bank was willing to lend. Anything more precise at the sourcing stage is invented confidence.
What is an independent sponsor? A buyer who finds and negotiates a deal first, then raises the equity for that specific deal from family offices and other backers. There's no committed fund behind them, so the deal itself has to carry the pitch and the economics get negotiated one transaction at a time. Fundless sponsor means the same thing.