One hack to find a lot of these SPV as a service filings is to search "a series of". They do have a formulaic filing process, but from looking into it, adding "fund I" is not part of that. It usually does indicate that its the first syndicate of the parent promoter, but they don't do it for every filing. Here is a search query where you can kind of see the variance: https://www.sec.gov/edgar/search/#/q=a%2520series%2520of&cat...
On the topic of "logical markets", it's not so much how logical a market is and more how much liquidity and available funds exist in the market. It doesn't matter if the market is logical or not, if there is a relative scarcity of funds there is bound to be a contraction.
Form ADV is the form used to register an investment advisor, which is fundamentally different than disclosing a fundraising event. It could definitely be interested to look into. The SEC presents its data in a relatively simple format. Here is the link for Form ADV historical filing data: https://www.sec.gov/foia-services/frequently-requested-docum...
You were actually right. I went and checked to see that some (not all) values were double counted. I've updated the graph to reflect this, and added a note. The trend remains identical, despite this change. Thanks for inspiring me to double check.
Great points! Obviously this analysis is not unconfounded as the methodology is pretty scrappy.
On point 3, I think both large and small investment groups saw large growth. This is lightly supported by the spike in filings related to SPV as a service companies like Angellist.