How to Find RIA Firms by Location and AUM in 2026

Quick Answer: The fastest way to find RIA firms by location and AUM is Origami — describe your ideal client (e.g., “fee-only RIAs in the Midwest with $500M+ AUM”) in one prompt, and its AI agent searches live SEC filings, firm websites, and databases to compile a verified contact list with emails, phone numbers, and LinkedIn profiles, ready for outreach.

Picture this: you sell compliance software to registered investment advisors. You know your best-fit clients are RIAs with $250 million to $1 billion AUM in the Southeast. So you open the SEC’s IAPD website, export a massive CSV, filter by state and AUM range, then switch to LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find the Chief Compliance Officer. Next you guess their email format (first.last@? f.last@?), paste everything into a spreadsheet, and fire off a mail merge. By day’s end you have 40 contacts — and 12 bounced emails. This grind is still the daily reality for many sales teams that prospect RIAs, despite a wealth of raw data sitting in public filings.

Why RIAs demand a completely different prospecting approach

RIAs don’t show up like tech startups. Most are small businesses — 90% have fewer than 50 employees — often run by a founder-owner who also serves as CEO, CIO, and CCO. Their firmographic profile is anchored to regulatory filings, not corporate websites. AUM replaces revenue as the key sizing metric, and geography matters enormously because many RIAs serve local or regional client bases. Traditional B2B databases built on revenue, employee count, and industry codes rarely map well to this world.

Because AUM is the central qualification filter, any prospecting effort that can’t distinguish between a $50 million solo-advisor shop and a $2 billion multi-family office wastes time immediately. Yet the core data is public: every SEC-registered RIA files Form ADV, which details AUM, number of accounts, fee structures, and key personnel. The challenge isn’t access; it’s turning that ocean of filing data into a list of reachable decision-makers without a week of manual labor.

Free resources that get you halfway — and why they fall short

The SEC’s Investment Adviser Public Disclosure (IAPD) site lets you search by state and download spreadsheets of RIAs with fields for AUM, number of clients, and executives. Many reps rely on it as a starting point. But the data is raw: you get a firm name and a regulatory address, not a direct phone number, email, or even the right LinkedIn profile. Enriching that list means hours of copy-pasting between tools.

BrightScope, once a go‑to for financial advisor data, now operates more as a retirement plan analytics platform with limited RIA contact information. FINRA’s BrokerCheck covers broker-dealers, not pure RIAs. So while these sources confirm a firm exists and its AUM range, they provide zero outreach-ready data. That gap forces most reps into the fragmented workflow we described above — two or three tools just to build the list, before a single sequence is sent.

How to build a targeted RIA list in minutes, not days

Instead of stitching together IAPD exports, LinkedIn, and email guesswork, you can use a tool that handles the entire data orchestration from a single prompt. Origami is built for exactly this kind of compound searching. You describe your ICP in plain English — say, “SEC-registered RIAs in California with $500 million to $3 billion AUM that use Charles Schwab as custodian” — and the AI agent crawls live web sources, parses ADV filings, scrapes firm websites for contact names, verifies emails and phone numbers, and outputs a clean prospect table ready for outreach.

No manual workflow building, no Boolean filters, no CSV juggling. The agent adapts its research method based on the target: for RIAs, it automatically pulls from the SEC’s IAPD and enriches with LinkedIn, firm websites, and other public sources. One sales leader selling portfolio analytics to RIAs told us: “I was impressed with how Origami pulled the exact AUM from their ADV filings and even showed which custodian they use — stuff that used to take me 20 minutes per firm, now I get a full list in under an hour.”

When we tested this for a fintech sales team targeting Texas-based RIAs with over $200M AUM, Origami returned 150 verified contacts, including direct dials and LinkedIn profiles, from a single prompt in under 20 minutes. The team launched a multi-channel sequence the same afternoon. That’s the difference between living in spreadsheets and actually selling.

Why traditional sales intelligence tools struggle with RIAs

Apollo and ZoomInfo are powerful for broad B2B markets, but their data models were designed around corporate sales — revenue, employee headcount, NAICS codes. Neither natively indexes AUM as a filter, nor do they refresh their databases from SEC filings. While you can sometimes find RIAs by searching “investment advisor” as an industry and layering on location, the results are hit-or-miss for smaller firms that don’t appear in standard business registries.

Clay can technically recreate an RIA-targeted workflow if you’re willing to build a multi-step enrichment chain: one step to scrape IAPD, another to match firm names to LinkedIn pages, another to find email patterns. But even then, Clay requires a technical user to configure HTTP APIs and waterfall providers — and many RIA-focused sales teams don’t have a dedicated ops person. A sales director for an RIA-focused SaaS company put it bluntly: “I found Clay to be a little overwhelming. If I can’t figure it out, I’m not investing the time.”

ZoomInfo’s data, while deep for large enterprises, is curated on a periodic refresh cycle — so if an RIA founder recently changed firms or a smaller shop just registered, it may not appear. And because RIAs operate under a regulatory framework with mandatory public disclosures, the freshest data always lives on the live web, not in a static database. That architectural difference matters enormously when your list’s accuracy directly affects deliverability and reply rates.

Below is a quick comparison of the most common tools reps use when prospecting RIAs, along with how they stack up.

Tool	Free Plan	Starting Price	Best For	Main Limitation
Origami	Yes (1,000 credits, no credit card)	Free, then $29/mo	AI-driven list building + built-in outreach, especially for RIAs and niche verticals	No CRM pipeline management
Apollo	Yes (900 annual credits)	$49/mo (annual)	High-volume email sequences with basic RIA filtering	AUM not a native filter; contact-centric database may miss smaller firms
ZoomInfo	No	~$15,000/year	Enterprise sales intelligence with deep org charts	No AUM filter; expensive for teams targeting SMB RIAs
Clay	Yes (500 actions/mo)	$167/mo	Complex enrichment workflows with web scraping	Requires technical workflow building; steep learning curve for non-engineers
Seamless.AI	Yes (1,000 credits/yr)	Contact sales	Quick contact lookups via browser extension	Limited list-building volume on free plan; no built-in RIA-specific logic

Turning an RIA list into actual conversations

Building the list is step one. The real win comes when you pair it with outreach that respects how RIA owners operate. Most of these individuals are not active LinkedIn posters — many describe their decision-makers as “this guy has two connections” or “LinkedIn is not where they live.” But they do read email, and they pay attention to personalized messages that show an understanding of their business.

With Origami, the same platform that generated the list also includes a built-in sequencer for multi-step email and LinkedIn outreach. You can launch a cadence the moment your list is ready, using AI-generated copy that references the firm’s AUM, custodian, or recent ADV filing updates. One SDR manager targeting RIAs in the Northeast told us: “It’s like everything is under one roof — I’m not bouncing between three tools just to send 50 emails.” Because emails are verified before the sequence fires, bounce rates stay low and sender reputation remains protected, which is critical when you’re running high-touch, high-value campaigns.

If you prefer to use your own outreach tool (like Outreach or Salesloft), you can export the enriched CSV with all contact fields and upload it. Either way, the core value is the same: a list of RIA decision-makers, built with live data, that you didn’t spend days assembling.

FAQ

Can I find RIAs by AUM for free?

Yes, the SEC’s IAPD database is free and searchable, but it lacks direct contact details. Enriching each record manually takes hours. Origami’s free plan automates this enrichment, pulling live data and giving you 1,000 credits with no credit card required.

What’s the best way to get RIA contact information?

An AI-powered tool like Origami searches SEC filings, firm websites, LinkedIn, and email APIs in one go, returning verified emails and phone numbers without manual lookups. The free tier lets you test the workflow with 1,000 credits.

Do Apollo or ZoomInfo have AUM filters?

No. Apollo and ZoomInfo filter by revenue and employee count, not AUM. You can find some RIAs by industry search, but you can’t target by assets under management. Origami builds lists based on AUM from the start, because it reads live SEC filings.

How often is RIA data updated?

RIAs must update Form ADV at least annually, and more often for material changes. Because Origami crawls the live web each time you prompt it, your list always reflects the latest filings, not a stale database snapshot.

Can I send emails directly from Origami?

Yes. Origami includes multi-step email and LinkedIn sequences on all paid plans. You can build a targeted RIA list, verify contacts, and launch outreach without leaving the platform, then push closed deals into your CRM.

Stop building RIA lists by hand

Finding registered investment advisor firms by location and AUM doesn’t have to be a three-tool, all-day affair. The data is public and plentiful — the hard part has always been turning it into a clean, contact-ready list without manual assembly. That’s exactly where a modern AI agent excels: it does the searching, enriching, and verifying while you focus on the conversations that close deals.

Start with a free Origami account (1,000 credits, no credit card), type in your ideal RIA profile, and see a prospect list appear in minutes. From there, enrich the contacts, fire up a sequence, and bring your best opportunities into your CRM. The RIA market is too relationship-driven to waste momentum on data entry.