That is why we can name the owner of a business with no website — the 97.7% that PrivCo, Grata, PitchBook and ZoomInfo can't see.6 million owner-operated businesses. Named owners, direct contacts, ranked by fit.
See the full breakdown by industry and country in the Serava Data Hub.
And it is not a database sitting unused. 35,000+ companies have been sourced and screened against signed acquisition mandates across the US and Canada, with owner-direct outreach packages built off them.
Grata, SourceScrub, PitchBook and ZoomInfo build their data by crawling the web and reading filings. A Main Street business with no website and no filings is invisible to that model. Serava starts from the public record instead — Companies House beneficial owners, US provider and licence registries, motor-carrier filings, Quebec trade licences — so we can name the owner, estimate their tenure, and hand you a direct phone or email for businesses no crawler can see. That is the off-market majority, and it is where real proprietary deal flow lives.
Not a black box. Every named owner traces to a government registry a crawler can't replicate. A sample of what is inside, measured on the live database:
Plus US Secretaries of State, EPA, IRS, Chicago, Texas TDLR, veterinary and pharmacy boards, and registries in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland — 25+ sources and counting.
Every platform scored on the same 8 capabilities that matter for sourcing off-market, sub-$20M, owner-operated acquisition targets. The research tools are excellent — just built for a different job.
Grade = share of the 8 scored capabilities each platform offers (partial credit for limited support), computed from the table below. It measures fit for off-market SMB owner sourcing only — not overall quality.
The data terminals charge $15,000–$100,000 a year and still can't do the top row. Serava is $425/mo— and your first deal map is free.
| Capability | Serava Off-market SMB sourcing from government registries | AI-modeled private-company financials | Directory of PE firms + portfolios | Web-crawl deal sourcing (now Datasite) | Institutional PE/VC research | On-market business-for-sale marketplace | B2B sales contact database |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Primary data source | Government registries | AI-modeled financials | PE-firm & portfolio directory | Web crawl + AI | Filings + research | Owner / broker listings | Web + community contacts |
| Off-market businesses with no website | |||||||
| Named SMB owners at scale | |||||||
| Owner age / tenure succession signal | |||||||
| Sub-$20M Main Street SMB focus | |||||||
| International registry coverage (UK, NZ, CA, AU, IE) | |||||||
| Direct owner phone + email | |||||||
| Ranked by acquisition fit | |||||||
| Done-for-you owner appointments | |||||||
| Entry price | $425/mo | $99/mo (reported) | $3,900/yr (reported) | $10K-100K/yr (reported) | $15K+/seat/yr (reported) | Free for buyers | $15K+/yr (reported) |
yes · partial / limited ·no. Competitor facts from public sources (2026). Pricing marked "(reported)" is third-party-reported, not vendor-published — confirm on a sales call. Serava database figures measured September 2026; owner-email coverage is strongest in US trucking/logistics and expanding by vertical.
These platforms are excellent at what they were built for, and the honest answer is that most of them do a different job than Serava. PitchBook, PrivCo and Crunchbase are deep research databases for institutional investors studying companies that already have filings, funding, or a press footprint. Grata and SourceScrub are web-crawl engines that map the mid-market by reading company websites. ZoomInfo and Apollo are sales-contact databases for B2B prospecting into companies with a digital presence. Private Equity Info is a directory of the dealmakers themselves — the PE firms, bankers and lenders around a transaction.
Serava does the one thing none of them are built for: it finds the owner of an off-market operating business — the plumbing company, the trucking firm, the dental practice with no website and no funding round — names them from the public record, estimates how long they have run the business, and gives you a direct phone or email. If your goal is to acquire a sub-$20M owner-operated company before it ever reaches a broker, that is the layer that matters, and it is the layer these tools structurally cannot reach.
Describe what you want to buy in plain English. We'll build a live map of matching owner-operated businesses — with owner names and contacts where available — for free.