A reference, published by an advisor

Finding out who owns a private company, or who might buy one, is harder than it should be. The information is public, scattered across a few thousand investor websites and a pile of regulatory filings nobody reads for pleasure, and the databases that collect it properly cost more per year than most business owners will ever spend on advice.

PEStore collects the part that matters most and gives it away: which investors buy in which sectors, what they already own and for how long, what they have filed with a regulator, and what comparable companies have actually sold for. 6,736 investors and 10,204 transactions, free to read, with every source named and every gap documented.

Who pays for it

It is published by FIH.com, an M&A advisory firm, and the advisory work is how the site pays for itself. There is no point being coy about the incentive: some readers are thinking about selling a company, or looking for one to buy, and a few of them will want an advisor. That is the whole business model.

An enquiry made anywhere on this site is answered by that desk, by a person, and it goes nowhere else. A valuation request, a claimed profile, a buyer search: same desk. Nobody is told you asked.

Every page here is free to read, with no login and no meter. What is sold is work rather than access: a researched buyer shortlist at a fixed fee, the same data delivered as a feed for people who need it in a spreadsheet instead of a browser, and advisory mandates. None of that changes a word of what the free pages say.

What is not for sale

No investor pays to be listed here, no position in a list can be bought, and there is no premium tier that makes a profile larger or moves it up a page. A directory that sells those things is worth nothing to the owner reading it, because they can no longer tell which firms are on the page for a reason and which are on it for a fee. That is a permanent rule, not a launch promise.

• No paid placement or paid inclusion. Firms are published because they passed the screen, and only then.
• No ranking or ordering for sale. Ordering is by the data on the page and nothing else.
• No contact data published, and none sold. Names, email addresses and phone numbers stay out of every published field.
• No company here is described as being for sale. Hold periods are shown because investors publish them, not as a hint about anyone.

A claimed profile gets the same treatment. Claiming lets a firm correct what is wrong and tell us what it is looking for. It does not buy a better position, and it does not change what the filings say.