Two of every three new S.F. raises is a fund, not a firm

Vol. I, No. 16 · San Francisco — Saturday, August 1, 2026

BY MEL ADLER, COMMERCE DESK

The paperwork is public even when the round is quiet. Any company that sells equity or debt to private investors must file a Form D with the Securities and Exchange Commission within fifteen days of its first sale, and the filing carries the issuer’s city on its face. In July, issuers headquartered in San Francisco filed 144 of them; 100 were new offerings rather than amendments to old ones. Sixty-eight were investment funds.

A fund is not a business in the ordinary sense. It is a pool that raises money in order to place it somewhere else — a venture partnership, a hedge vehicle, a single-deal SPV. The other 32 new filers were operating companies: firms raising to hire, to build, to ship a product. That is a 68–32 split, and it has widened. In July of last year the same search turned up 62 new offerings, 35 of them funds — a 56.5 percent fund share. A year on, new offerings are up 61 percent, but the fund count nearly doubled, 35 to 68, while operating companies edged from 27 to 32.

The read is that the “capital is back in San Francisco” story is, at the filing level, mostly the finance layer thickening. The machinery for allocating money is being stood up faster than the things money gets allocated to.

The dollars tell a second story. The 68 funds reported selling $473 million; the 32 operating companies reported $713 million. But strip one name and the operating side collapses. Core Automation, a technology issuer, reported selling $432 million of a $635 million target — roughly 61 percent of every operating dollar raised in the city that month. The remaining 31 companies split $281 million among them. The next largest were a health company, Candid Group ($105 million); the pharmaceutical firm Jaguar Health ($41 million); and the developer-tools company Fly.io ($23 million).

So the shape is a barbell: a great many funds standing up to invest, a smaller number of companies raising to operate, and inside that number a single automation bet swallowing the pot. Confidence is medium-high on the direction — these are counts issuers filed themselves, and a Form D’s address makes the San Francisco cut clean. The caveats are the honest ones: amounts sold are cumulative and funds close in rolling tranches, so their $473 million is a floor; the industry labels are the filers’ own; and this is one month of one city. But 189 San Francisco Form Ds this July against 150 a year ago, with the fund count nearly doubled beneath that total, is a change in the mix rather than noise — and it is the funds that changed it.

Across 350 productions in the Film Commission’s location log, five northeast neighborhoods hold nearly half of every setup. The Sunset — where far more people live — turns up 17 times, fewer than the Fairmont Hotel alone.

BY EMMETT GRADY, ARCHIVES

The city keeps a list of where the movies happen. The San Francisco Film Commission’s public catalog runs to 2,214 location entries across 350 features and series, from the silent era to last year. Sorted by neighborhood, it is less a map of San Francisco than a map of the postcard.

Five neighborhoods do most of the work. The Financial District and South Beach (299 entries), North Beach (202), Nob Hill (165), Chinatown (163) and the Mission (153) account for 982 of the 2,070 mapped setups — 47 percent. Add the Tenderloin, Russian Hill and the cable-car spine and you have very nearly the whole of movie San Francisco: a tight northeast crescent of hills, bay views and Victorian frontage, ringed by one bridge. The single most-filmed place is that bridge, 27 times over; then City Hall, 23; then the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill, 21.

What is missing is where people live. The western and southern residential districts — the Sunset, both Richmonds, the Excelsior, the Outer Mission, Oceanview — log 138 entries between them, under 7 percent of the mapped total. Sunset/Parkside, the largest of the map’s neighborhoods, appears 17 times; Oceanview–Merced–Ingleside twice; Portola three times. A camera has visited the Fairmont Hotel’s single block (21) more often than it has visited all of the Sunset (17).

This is not a plot against the avenues, only economics and sightlines: a production shoots what reads instantly as San Francisco, and what reads as San Francisco is the tourist’s three-mile view. But the effect is that the city in the national imagination is the one residents mostly visit — the bridge, the cable car, the crooked block of Lombard — and not the fog-belt grid where the schools and the families are. On screen, the larger half of the city is a place that does not quite exist. Confidence is high on the concentration; it is the city’s own catalog. The one caveat is that it counts location entries, so a shoot that ranged widely weights more than a chamber piece — but count whole productions instead of setups and the postcard still wins going away.