Last updated: August 2026
You raised the search capital and the clock started the day the last commitment came in. Stanford GSB's 2026 study covers over 850 core search funds in the US and Canada since 1996 and puts the aggregate acquisition rate at 58%. About half the funds launched between 2021 and 2024 acquired a company. Stanford also says acquiring one typically takes around 20 months, which is a long time to be filling a pipeline.
Scouly is a screening layer for that stretch. 173,769 companies across seven verticals, covering all 50 states and DC plus the UK, scored from public records, none of them for sale.
Self-funded buyers can run one metro and one industry until something lands. A funded search usually can't. Investors expect a defined mandate and a why-this-industry story that holds up in a memo, backed by a pipeline wide enough to survive a brutal no-reply rate.
So the work splits in two. Pick markets whose structure is worth attacking, then rank the firms inside them well enough to defend the order. A marketplace helps with neither, because it only shows you businesses that already hired a broker, at a price that already reflects a process.
The economics of both models are in search fund vs self-funded search, and the other path has its own page for self-funded searchers.
Scouly's coverage by vertical, US companies only:
| Vertical | US companies tracked |
|---|---|
| Manufacturing | 45,096 |
| Dental | 26,563 |
| Auto repair | 23,078 |
| HVAC and plumbing | 20,259 |
| Landscaping | 10,585 |
| Veterinary | 8,884 |
| Funeral homes | 3,384 |
Add the UK and the total reaches 173,769, spread over 3,049 vertical and metro combinations. A mandate that reads "manufacturing and HVAC across the Southeast" becomes a ranked list of named firms in an afternoon, and it re-cuts in minutes when investors push back on the geography. Start at the Markets index.
A platform thesis lives or dies on market structure. A metro full of owner-run shops with no consolidator in it is a very different investment from one where a PE-backed platform has already taken most of the scale. Scouly measures that density per market from OpenStreetMap establishment counts and registry records, and it feeds the score directly. The method, including how to estimate it yourself for free, is in reading market fragmentation for roll-up sourcing.
For a funded searcher it does double duty. It picks the market, and it gives you the add-on math for the years after close.
Across the SBA 7(a) and 504 FOIA files, Scouly tracks 66,307 loans in its covered industries. 7,892 of them mature between 2026 and 2028. A maturing loan is a dated event on a real balance sheet, and it lands near the moment an owner reconsiders what happens next. It is a screening signal about timing and nothing more. The full argument is in SBA loan data as an acquisition signal, with the state cuts on the SBA loans hub.
Stanford puts the median search fund purchase price in 2024 and 2025 at $16 million, with services, software and education leading the industry mix. Scouly's verticals sit below that. Median peak SBA loan runs from $350,000 in landscaping to $697,250 in funeral homes across 66,310 borrowers, and those are loan amounts, never valuations.
In a search fund context Scouly is strongest at two jobs: finding the fragmented markets where a platform can be assembled, and finding the add-on tier that platform buys in years two through five. If your mandate starts at $3M of EBITDA, read the SBA layer as evidence a bank underwrote the firm and as a rough floor on financeable size. The deal benchmark tool places a specific loan against the vertical distribution.
Scouly never estimates revenue or EBITDA and never contacts owners. Every input to the deterministic 0 to 100 score is loan maturity, registry longevity or fragmentation, with the record linked on the profile.
Investor updates go wrong when the sourcing section is a number with no provenance. Scouly's raw material is public and citable. The SBA maturity series sits on the data page as a plain CSV, 66,307 loans counted by the year they come due across 4,218 rows, released under CC0 with the methodology attached.
So when your update says 7,892 SBA loans in your target industries mature between 2026 and 2028, an LP can download the same CSV and check it. A sourcing claim that survives that test beats a pipeline count nobody can audit.
Explorer is free with 10 full profile unlocks, enough to test whether the data supports your thesis before you pay anything. Operator is $35 a month, unlimited unlocks. Build the mandate in the thesis builder first, then work the ranked list.
Is Scouly useful for a traditional search fund, or only for self-funded buyers? Both, for different reasons. Self-funded buyers use it to find one company they can finance with an SBA 7(a) loan. Search funds use it to pick markets and to build the add-on pipeline behind a platform. The company sizes visible in SBA and PPP records skew smaller than the $16 million median search fund purchase price, so treat the platform search and the add-on search as separate jobs.
How do search funds source proprietary deals? Two routes carry most of it. One is relationships, meaning brokers, investors and operators who pass along names. The other is direct outreach to a list the searcher built. Public-records screening feeds that second route. It answers which owners to write to first by ranking on registry longevity, SBA loan maturity and local market fragmentation, then leaves the letter and the relationship to you.
Can I use Scouly data in an investor update or LP memo? Yes. The SBA maturity series is published under CC0 on the data page as a CSV with its methodology, so anyone reading your memo can verify the aggregate figures against the same file. Company-level records link back to the original SBA, PPP, Form 5500 or registry filing on each profile.
What does Scouly not tell me about a target? Revenue, EBITDA, owner age, asking price, and whether the owner wants to sell. No public source reports those for a private company, and Scouly does not model them. What the records confirm is that a firm exists, how long it has been registered, whether a bank lent against it and when that debt comes due, and how crowded its local market is.
Which verticals should a search fund look at first? Manufacturing has the most tracked US companies at 45,096, spread across 446 metro areas. Auto repair covers slightly more metros at 448, so if geographic breadth is the constraint on your mandate, start there. Funeral homes are the smallest vertical at 3,384 US firms and carry the largest median SBA loan at $697,250, so the borrowers in that vertical are the biggest businesses Scouly tracks by financed size.