Private equity firms in Los Angeles: 85 SEC-registered PE advisers from Century City to the beach cities

Use this report if you're selling a company and want to know which Southern California buyers are real, looking for work in the region's deal business, or selling to private equity firms and the companies they own. It covers the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metro, which takes in Orange County.

The largest private equity firms in Los Angeles

Source: SEC, Registered Investment Advisers file, October 2026, from each adviser's latest Form ADV (Items 5.A, 5.F and 7.B). Included: a main office ZIP code in Los Angeles or Orange County, private equity funds at least half of private funds, and private fund assets at least half of regulatory assets.

Regulatory assets under management count each private fund's value plus investors' uncalled commitments, for a single adviser entity. They're comparable across advisers, but not with the AUM a firm publishes.

Where LA's private equity firms are

The split by county is 76 in Los Angeles County and 9 in Orange County. By size, 3 report $25 billion or more of regulatory assets, 11 report $5 billion to $25 billion, 31 report $1 billion to $5 billion, 11 report $500 million to $1 billion and 29 report less. The median adviser has $1.06 billion and 15 employees.

The big names that aren't on the list

Our rule keeps advisers whose business is mainly private equity funds, and Form ADV defines those broadly: any private fund that isn't a hedge, liquidity, real estate, securitized asset or venture capital fund and doesn't give investors ordinary redemption rights. Several of Southern California's largest managers fail the test anyway:

Pathway is the one most readers would count as private equity, since every one of its private funds is a PE fund; it misses only because separate accounts make up most of its regulatory assets. Treat it as a large PE investor that our rule leaves out.

The listed managers headquartered in Los Angeles

Ares Management's 10-K gives 1800 Avenue of the Stars as its address and reports $622.5 billion of AUM, more than 4,250 employees in over 55 offices and $5,601.5 million of 2025 revenue. Brookfield Oaktree Holdings, the listed Oaktree entity at 333 South Grand Avenue, reported $679.5 million of revenue. Houlihan Lokey, at 10250 Constellation Boulevard, is an investment bank rather than a fund manager, but it advises on many of the deals these firms do; it reported $2,617.5 million of revenue for the year to March 2026.

What the Census count covers

There is no private equity code in County Business Patterns. Private equity fund managers are classified in NAICS 523940 with financial planners and mutual fund managers, and venture capital companies in 523910. The figures below are for the group that contains both, NAICS 5239.

Los Angeles County has 2,538 of the establishments and 22,479 of the employees; Orange County has 1,456 and 8,184. The industry here is small offices: 3,158 establishments (79%) have 1 to 4 employees and only 49 have 100 or more, including 5 with 500 to 999 and 2 with 1,000 or more. In broader bands, 3,789 have 1 to 19 employees and 156 have 20 to 99. These are locations with paid employees, not companies; the self-employed aren't counted.

Prospecting LA private equity firms

LA's PE firms are small teams: half have 15 or fewer employees on Form ADV. The partners decide, often in the same meeting, and the useful sale is usually to the portfolio, through the partner or operating executive who owns a company after close.

Illustrative example. The company, fees and results are invented; the counts are from the SEC data above.

Palisade Benefits (palisadebenefits.example) designs employee benefits programs for PE-backed companies. It targets the 45 LA PE advisers with $1 billion or more of regulatory assets, plus the operating partner or CFO at each, about 90 people. Its pitch is portfolio-wide: one program a sponsor can roll out across several companies. If 4 sponsors each bring 3 portfolio companies at a $30,000 annual fee, that's $360,000 a year. Triggers are new platform acquisitions and a sponsor's first hire of a dedicated operating partner. Bebop finds the firms that match and researches each one; for the people side, see buying authority.

Subject: One benefits program across [firm]'s portfolio

Hi [first name],

[Firm] now owns [number] companies in [sector or region]. Each one is probably renewing benefits on its own calendar with its own broker.

We build a single program a sponsor can offer across portfolio companies, which usually lowers cost and makes add-on integrations faster.

Could I show you what it looked like for a sponsor your size?

[Your name]

Where to look

Next step: compare LA with private equity firms in Chicago, or see the national ranking in the largest private equity firms.