If you have raised before, you have probably heard the pitch: an advisor who charges $5K a month to “open their network,” delivers a handful of lukewarm introductions over two quarters, and walks away paid regardless of whether anything closes. The retainer model places all of the risk on the side of the table with the least money, and most founders only learn this after signing.
This database documents the other model. It covers 150 fundraising advisors and placement agents who work on success fee alone, meaning they are paid when your round closes and receive nothing before that.
I built it together with Max Pog, and the data comes from his Virtual 1:1 VC Pitch Conference events, where every advisor disclosed their own figures directly and with consent. That collection method is the reason this dataset exists nowhere else: you cannot scrape what people only share in a room, and no directory forces advisors to state their fees and their actual results side by side.
The honest math first
I would rather you see the uncomfortable numbers before the paywall than discover them after paying, so here they are.
Two of those numbers deserve a hard look. The 132 advisors who report capital raised claim $7.8 billion between them over the last twelve months, and 83% of it belongs to the top ten. The median advisor closed $625K. Half the list raised less than $1M for clients last year.
That’s the real shape of this market: a handful of heavyweight placement agents, a long tail of people between deals, and no retainer protecting you from picking wrong. The database gives you the numbers to tell them apart, which is precisely what the retainer model never forces anyone to disclose.
When a success-fee advisor makes sense, and when it never does
Worth deciding before you open the list.
It can work when you are raising a fund or a large round in a market where you hold no network, the advisor’s reported raises match your check size and geography, and the fee lands inside the 2 to 5% median. A placement agent who genuinely knows the LPs in a region you cannot reach is selling you a network that would otherwise take years to build, and for a GP that trade can be rational; the fund economics model and the LP dynamics breakdown will help you price it properly.
It rarely works when you are a pre-seed startup hoping someone else will do the raising. Investors at that stage back founders directly, and an intermediated pitch tends to read as a signal that the founder could not get the meeting alone. If that is where you are, you will get considerably further, at a cost of zero percent, with the investor outreach system, the full investor lists library, the guide to writing a top 1% cold DM, and the warm-path method that lifted replies from 8% to 45%.
One further note on fees, because it surprises people: investors will see your cap table and your use of funds during diligence, and a success fee above roughly 10% on an early round reads as a red flag to the very people the advisor is introducing you to. The median exists for a reason, and the term sheet guide covers how these costs surface in negotiation.
What’s inside the database
▫️ All 150 advisors with name, email (every row) and LinkedIn (147 of 150)
▫️ Min and max success fee for 148 of them, so you can benchmark any quote against the market before negotiating
▫️ Self-reported capital raised in the last 12 months, the single best sorting signal in the file
▫️ 13 client types mapped: 110 work with startups, 69 with VC funds, 48 with PE funds, plus real estate, private credit, funds of funds, secondaries and accelerators
▫️ Region coverage for 149 rows, from the 42 who claim global reach to specialists in India, Africa, the Gulf and Latin America
Below it sits the vetting sequence, the five questions that expose a weak advisor in a single call, and the fee math worked through on real examples.
And a word on what the subscription actually is, because this database is one file in a much larger library. A single membership opens:
▫️ 10,000+ named investors across every list, including the 2,000+ European family offices database, 300+ VCs that accept cold pitches, and the ultimate list of investor lists
▫️ The 375 Prompt Book for Fundraising and every playbook across a raise, from first intro call to data room
▫️ 200+ pitch decks that raised capital and the full financial models library, including the cap table template and the runway model you will want before signing any advisor mandate
▫️ A new investor list every week
If you are actively raising, the arithmetic is simple: one avoided month of a $5K retainer pays for years of all of it.
Cancel anytime. First subscribers get 50% off forever.