Form SB-1 Files Dataset

The Form SB-1 Files Dataset is a closed historical corpus of small-business Securities Act registration statements filed on EDGAR between June 1, 1996 and the form's discontinuation on February 4, 2008. Each record is a single EDGAR submission of either Form SB-1 — an original registration statement filed by a small business issuer for a public cash offering capped at $10 million in any rolling twelve-month period — or Form SB-1/A, an amendment to a previously filed SB-1. The filer of every record is the issuer of the securities being registered, qualifying as a "small business issuer" under Item 10 of Regulation S-B with revenues and public float each below $25 million. The dataset is delivered as monthly ZIP containers; each accession folder holds the registration statement, its retained exhibits, and a metadata.json manifest. Because the form was rescinded with the adoption of the smaller reporting company framework, the corpus is static — no new SB-1 or SB-1/A filings have been made since February 2008.

Update Frequency
Daily
Updated at
2026-04-15
Earliest Sample Date
1996-06-01
Total Size
45.3 MB
Total Records
2,711
Container Format
ZIP
Content Types
TXT, JSON, HTML, PDF, XFD
Form Types
SB-1, SB-1/A

Dataset APIs

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Dataset Index JSON API

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Dataset Files

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What This Dataset Contains

The dataset captures every SB-1 and SB-1/A submission accepted by EDGAR from June 1, 1996 through early February 2008, when Release 33-8876 ("Smaller Reporting Company Regulatory Relief and Simplification") rescinded Regulation S-B and the SB-series of forms. Earlier paper SB-1 filings made after the form's 1993 introduction are not included; EDGAR coverage begins June 1996. The corpus is bounded and closed: SB-1 was the small-offering registration vehicle within the SEC's 1992 Small Business Initiatives (Release 33-6949), and no further filings are possible under the discontinued regime.

The underlying filing is a Securities Act of 1933 registration statement designed for issuers operating under the now-retired Regulation S-B disclosure regime. Form SB-1 permitted qualifying issuers to register up to $10 million of securities in any rolling twelve-month period using a simplified prospectus-style format, with non-financial disclosure under Regulation S-B and financial statements under Item 310 of Regulation S-B in lieu of Regulation S-K and S-X. Form SB-1/A is the amendment vehicle, filed against the same Securities Act file number (the 333-… fileNo) as the original SB-1 and used to respond to staff comment letters, refresh stale financial statements, change offering terms, or finalize pricing and effectiveness.

The dataset is distributed as monthly ZIP archives keyed under {year}/{year}-{month}.zip, with each accession submission expanding to its own folder containing a metadata.json manifest plus every retained document. Distributed file types are TXT, JSON, HTML, PDF, and XFD (XFDL fillable-form facsimiles). Image files referenced as GRAPHIC document entries — common in late-1990s and early-2000s filings — are intentionally excluded from the ZIP but remain enumerated in the manifest so that the original submission inventory is preserved.

Content Structure of a Single Record

What one record represents

One record is a single EDGAR submission of either a Form SB-1 or a Form SB-1/A. Each record is keyed by a single accession number and consists of one folder holding every retained document in that submission together with a metadata.json manifest that describes the submission as a whole. Multiple accession folders are bundled inside monthly ZIP archives keyed under {year}/{year}-{month}.zip, but the unit of analysis is the accession folder, not the monthly archive.

Container and per-accession layout

When a monthly archive is unpacked, it expands into a year-month folder, beneath which every accession number receives its own subfolder. The folder name is the 18-digit accession number with hyphens stripped (canonical accession 0001121781-07-000398 becomes folder 000112178107000398). The on-disk shape is:

1 form-sb1-files/
2 └── 2007/
3 ├── 2007-12.zip
4 └── 2007-12/
5 └── 000112178107000398/
6 ├── metadata.json
7 ├── surfacesb1a1121107.htm (primary SB-1/A document)
8 └── exhibit10one.htm (Exhibit 10.1, accountant consent)

A metadata.json is always present. The primary registration statement is normally an HTML document (or, for older filings, a plain TXT document) whose document-type tag is SB-1 or SB-1/A. Exhibits sit alongside as additional HTML or TXT documents named with conventions such as exhibit10one.htm, ex5_1.txt, or ex23.htm. PDF and XFD documents appear in some filings, particularly older ones containing paper-form facsimiles. The complete SGML-wrapped submission text file (e.g. 0001121781-07-000398.txt) is enumerated in metadata.json but is not always retained on disk. Image files referenced as GRAPHIC document entries (typically .gif and .jpg) are intentionally excluded from the ZIP even though they remain listed in the manifest.

metadata.json schema

The manifest is a single JSON object describing the whole submission. Its keys are:

  • formType"SB-1" or "SB-1/A".
  • accessionNo — canonical EDGAR accession with hyphens, e.g. "0001121781-07-000398".
  • filedAt — ISO-8601 timestamp with timezone, e.g. "2007-12-11T14:35:40-05:00".
  • description — short human-readable label of the form's purpose.
  • linkToFilingDetails — URL to the primary document on EDGAR.
  • linkToHtml — URL to the EDGAR filing-index page (...-index.htm).
  • linkToTxt — URL to the full SGML submission text file.
  • linkToXbrl — XBRL instance URL if any. Empty across the SB-1 corpus, because Regulation S-B small-business issuers were outside the XBRL tagging mandate during the form's life.
  • id — opaque per-record identifier, e.g. "bea958f158baf9ea0c27156384f49e02".
  • documentFormatFiles[] — ordered array of every document in the submission, sorted by sequence. Each element carries sequence, size (bytes, as a string), documentUrl, optional description, and type (the EDGAR document-type tag such as SB-1, SB-1/A, EX-3, EX-4, EX-5, EX-10.1, EX-21, EX-23, EX-24, EX-99, or GRAPHIC). The final element typically has a blank sequence and blank type and represents the complete SGML submission .txt.
  • dataFiles[] — array reserved for XBRL/data-file references; empty across SB-1 records.
  • entities[] — array of EDGAR header entity blocks describing the filer (and any co-registrants). A Filer entry carries companyName, cik, irsNo, stateOfIncorporation, fiscalYearEnd, fileNo (the 333-… Securities Act file number that links amendments to the original SB-1), filmNo, sic (industry classification with code and label, e.g. "5960 Retail-Nonstore Retailers"), act ("33" for Securities Act registrations), and type (the form type as recorded on the entity).

Because GRAPHIC entries are stripped from the ZIP but remain in documentFormatFiles, the on-disk file list for an accession is always a strict subset of the manifest array.

Constituent documents inside one record

The body of an SB-1 record is the registration statement together with its exhibits. The registration statement itself is a prospectus-style document that typically presents, in order:

  • Cover page with the registrant's name, state of incorporation, IRS EIN, SIC code, principal office address, and approximate date of proposed sale to the public.
  • Calculation of Registration Fee table listing the title of each class of securities, amount to be registered, proposed maximum offering price per unit, proposed maximum aggregate offering price, and registration fee.
  • Prospectus summary.
  • Risk factors.
  • Use of proceeds.
  • Determination of offering price.
  • Dilution.
  • Selling security holders (where applicable).
  • Plan of distribution.
  • Description of securities.
  • Interests of named experts and counsel.
  • Information with respect to the registrant: description of business, description of property, legal proceedings, market for common equity, management's discussion and analysis or plan of operation, executive compensation, security ownership of certain beneficial owners and management, and certain relationships and related transactions.
  • Financial statements prepared under Regulation S-B Item 310.
  • Changes in and disagreements with accountants.
  • Signatures.
  • Exhibit index.

Exhibits commonly retained as separate files inside the accession folder include articles of incorporation and bylaws (EX-3.x), specimen stock certificates and instruments defining rights of security holders (EX-4.x), legal opinions on the legality of securities issued (EX-5), material contracts (EX-10.x), subsidiaries lists (EX-21), accountants' consents (EX-23), powers of attorney (EX-24), and miscellaneous additional exhibits (EX-99).

Each retained document is wrapped in EDGAR's SGML <DOCUMENT> envelope, with <TYPE>, <SEQUENCE>, <FILENAME>, optional <DESCRIPTION>, and <TEXT> markers framing the inner HTML or text body:

1 <DOCUMENT>
2 <TYPE>SB-1/A
3 <SEQUENCE>1
4 <FILENAME>surfacesb1a1121107.htm
5 <DESCRIPTION>SURFACE COATINGS, INC.
6 <TEXT>
7 <!doctype html public "-//IETF//DTD HTML//EN">
8 <HTML> ... </HTML>
9 </TEXT>
10 </DOCUMENT>

Exhibits use the same wrapper with a different <TYPE> (e.g. EX-10.1, EX-23).

How SB-1 and SB-1/A records differ

Structurally, SB-1 and SB-1/A records share the same folder layout, the same metadata.json schema, and the same <DOCUMENT>-wrapped document model. They differ in three meaningful ways:

  1. formType and the <TYPE> of the primary document are SB-1 versus SB-1/A.
  2. An SB-1/A almost always shares the same fileNo as the original SB-1 and any prior amendments; that 333-… file number is the linkage device by which EDGAR threads the amendment chain across distinct accession numbers and distinct monthly archives.
  3. An SB-1/A may contain a complete restatement of the registration statement or only the amended portions plus a shortened exhibit list. Per-record document count and total bytes therefore vary widely, and an SB-1/A record may legitimately omit components that were already filed with a prior amendment and incorporated by reference.

In the late phase of the form's life, SB-1/A amendments outnumber original SB-1 filings because the form was being wound down rather than newly adopted.

What the dataset includes and excludes

Each accession record includes the metadata.json manifest, the primary registration statement document, every retained exhibit document in HTML, TXT, PDF, or XFD form, and, where retained, the complete SGML submission text. It excludes binary image files referenced by the filing as GRAPHIC entries — including embedded financial-statement screenshots, prospectus diagrams, signature-page scans, and corporate logos. These images remain enumerated inside documentFormatFiles (with their EDGAR documentUrl, byte size, and GRAPHIC type tag) so the manifest is a faithful inventory of the original submission, but their bytes are not written into the ZIP.

The practical consequence is that any <IMG> reference inside a retained HTML document points at a filename that is not present locally. For filings that placed key financial statements inside images (a common pattern in the late-1990s and early-2000s SB-1 corpus), the textual record alone may not display the balance sheet, income statement, statement of stockholders' equity, or cash flow statement when rendered offline. The original images can still be fetched from EDGAR via the documentUrl preserved in each documentFormatFiles entry.

Evolution from 1996 through 2008

Across the dataset's twelve-year span the underlying filing format evolved meaningfully even though the regulatory anatomy of SB-1 itself remained broadly stable.

In the early years (1996 through approximately 1999), submissions reached EDGAR primarily as plain ASCII text. The registration statement and exhibits inside an accession folder are predominantly .txt files wrapped in the SGML <DOCUMENT> envelope, with all tabular content (cover-page tables, fee calculation tables, capitalization tables, financial statements) rendered as fixed-width ASCII. Some filings of this era include PDF or XFD (XFDL) documents as paper-form facsimiles or fillable-form facsimiles, particularly where the filer needed to reproduce a manually executed signature page or a scanned exhibit.

From roughly 2000 onward, HTML adoption accelerated, and by 2003-2008 nearly every SB-1 and SB-1/A record presents the registration statement and its exhibits as .htm documents that embed proper HTML markup inside the SGML wrapper. Image-based financial statements became more common in this era, which is also when the GRAPHIC exclusion has the largest visual impact on the locally extracted record.

XBRL never applied to SB-1: small-business issuers using Regulation S-B were outside the XBRL tagging mandate during the form's life, and linkToXbrl and dataFiles[] are empty across the corpus. The smaller-reporting-company rules that succeeded Regulation S-B in February 2008 also discontinued Form SB-1, so there is no late-period XBRL chapter for this dataset. Filing volume itself trailed off sharply in the form's final years, and the late SB-1/A skew described above is part of the same phase-out pattern.

Interpretation and extraction notes

A few characteristics matter when reading or extracting from these records:

  • Two inventories, not one. documentFormatFiles[] is the authoritative inventory of the original EDGAR submission, but the on-disk file list is the authoritative inventory of what is retained in the dataset. The two diverge whenever GRAPHIC entries (or, occasionally, the complete-submission .txt) are present in the manifest but absent from the folder.
  • <TYPE> is reliable, <DESCRIPTION> is not. The SGML <TYPE> line is drawn from EDGAR's exhibit-type vocabulary and is reliable for programmatic routing. The <DESCRIPTION> line is filer-supplied free text and is inconsistent across issuers.
  • SB-1/A is a delta, not a self-contained registration. Portions of the registration statement may be incorporated by reference to the original SB-1 or to prior amendments, and the exhibit list may legitimately consist only of newly filed or refiled exhibits. Treat an isolated SB-1/A accession as one node in a fileNo chain rather than as a complete prospectus.
  • fileNo is the amendment-chain key. The 333-… Securities Act file number in entities[] groups an original SB-1 with all its SB-1/A amendments across different accession numbers and different monthly archives; cik alone does not, because a single issuer may file multiple unrelated registrations.
  • Regulation S-B financial statements are reduced-scope. Item 310 permits two years of audited balance sheets and statements of operations rather than the three years required of larger issuers under Regulation S-X, which affects downstream financial-data extraction and time-series construction.
  • Image-resident financials require external fetching. Pipelines that need to extract figures from rendered financial-statement images must retrieve those binaries separately from the EDGAR URLs preserved in the documentFormatFiles entries; they are never present in the ZIP.
  • Encoding split. Pre-2000 records are predominantly TXT inside the SGML envelope; post-2002 records are predominantly HTM. Parsers that target only one of these will silently miss roughly half the corpus.

Who Files or Publishes This Dataset, and When

Who files

The filer of every SB-1 record is the issuer of the securities being registered. Form SB-1 was restricted to companies meeting the SEC's "small business issuer" definition under Item 10 of Regulation S-B. To qualify, an issuer had to be:

  • a U.S. or Canadian company (foreign private issuers outside Canada were ineligible);
  • not an investment company;
  • not a majority-owned subsidiary of a parent that was itself not a small business issuer;
  • below $25 million in revenues for its most recent fiscal year; and
  • below $25 million in public float (voting and non-voting common equity held by non-affiliates).

Within that population, SB-1 was the most narrowly scoped registration vehicle: it could only be used for cash offerings of up to $10 million in any continuous twelve-month period, and only if the issuer had not already registered more than $10 million on Form SB-1 or its predecessor Form S-18 in the same rolling window. Selling shareholders, underwriters, and other parties named in the prospectus are not filers; only the issuer signs and submits the registration statement.

When the record is created

SB-1 is event-driven, not periodic. A record exists only because an eligible small business issuer chose to register a specific public offering of cash-sold securities under Section 5 of the Securities Act of 1933. There is no recurring due date.

  • Form SB-1: filed once, when the issuer launches a registered offering within the eligibility and dollar limits.
  • Form SB-1/A: filed during SEC staff review of the original SB-1. Amendments are typically prompted by staff comment letters, stale-financial-statement refreshes required under Item 310 of Regulation S-B, changes to offering size, price, use of proceeds, or underwriting terms, or by a final pricing or effectiveness amendment. A single registration commonly produces several SB-1/A records before the statement becomes effective or is withdrawn.

The dataset captures the SB-1 and SB-1/A submissions themselves, not the SEC's effectiveness order. EDGAR coverage begins June 1, 1996; earlier paper filings made after the form's 1993 introduction are not included.

Regulatory framework

  • Securities Act of 1933. SB-1 is a Section 5 registration statement; its prospectus satisfies the statute's general prohibition on offering or selling securities without an effective registration.
  • Regulation S-B. SB-1 issuers followed Regulation S-B for non-financial disclosure and Item 310 for financial statements, in lieu of Regulation S-K. Regulation S-B permitted fewer years of audited financials and reduced executive compensation, related-party, and business-description disclosure.
  • Small Business Initiatives. The SB-series (SB-1, SB-2, 10-KSB, 10-QSB) was created by the Commission in 1992 in Release 33-6949 ("Small Business Initiatives") to reduce the cost of public capital formation for smaller companies. Form SB-1 was the small-offering registration vehicle within that system.

Discontinuation

In Release 33-8876 ("Smaller Reporting Company Regulatory Relief and Simplification"), adopted December 19, 2007 and effective February 4, 2008, the SEC rescinded Regulation S-B and the SB-series, folding scaled disclosure into Regulation S-K and the standard Securities Act forms under the new "smaller reporting company" category. No SB-1 or SB-1/A filings have been made since February 2008, and this dataset is historical and closed. Eligible issuers in the pipeline at sunset migrated subsequent amendments to Form S-1/S-1A under the new regime.

Important distinctions

  • Foreign and investment-company issuers. Foreign private issuers outside Canada used Form F-1, F-3, or F-4. Investment companies used N-1A, N-2, or other Investment Company Act forms and were ineligible for SB-1 regardless of size.
  • Withdrawn or never-effective filings. SB-1 and SB-1/A records remain in EDGAR and in this dataset whether or not the offering ultimately became effective or was withdrawn on Form RW.
  • Amendments belong to a chain. SB-1/A records continue an existing registration; they are not standalone transactions and should be linked to the original SB-1 filer and offering.

How This Dataset Differs From Similar Datasets or Filings

Form SB-1 occupies a narrow slot: small-business Securities Act registrations filed between June 1996 and February 2008 under the now-retired Regulation S-B disclosure system. The most useful comparisons are the forms it ran alongside, the regime that defined its content, and the post-2008 alternatives that absorbed its function.

Form SB-2

The direct sibling form and the single closest comparison. Same eligibility (small-business issuer, revenues and public float each below $25 million), same Regulation S-B disclosure schedule, same 2008 sunset. The sharp differentiator is the offering ceiling: SB-1 capped registered offerings at $10 million per rolling 12 months; SB-2 had no cap. Form SB-2 was the dominant form in practice; SB-1 represents the much smaller subset of issuers who deliberately accepted the cap in exchange for the lighter prospectus.

Form S-1

The general-purpose Securities Act registration statement, available to issuers of any size and still active today. The sharp differentiator is issuer eligibility and disclosure regime: Form S-1 has never had a size restriction and is prepared under Regulation S-K and S-X, whereas SB-1 was confined to sub-$25 million issuers using Regulation S-B's reduced schedule. For post-February 2008 small-issuer registrations, S-1 filtered by smaller reporting company status is the natural successor dataset.

Regulation S-B (the disclosure system)

Not a form but the integrated disclosure framework that defined SB-1 and SB-2 content. The sharp differentiator is scope rather than purpose: Regulation S-B is a content standard (two years of audited financials instead of three, scaled compensation tables, simplified MD&A), not a filing population. Treat it as the rulebook the SB-1 corpus was written under, not as an alternative dataset.

Form 1-A (Regulation A / Regulation A+)

The closest functional successor for very small offerings. The sharp differentiator is legal mechanism: Form 1-A operates under an exemption from registration and produces qualified, not registered, securities, with different resale and ongoing-reporting consequences. SB-1 was a full Section 5 registration. Offering caps also diverge ($10 million for SB-1; $20 million Tier 1 / $75 million Tier 2 for current Regulation A+).

Smaller Reporting Company framework (post-February 2008)

The status-based regime that replaced SB-1/SB-2/Regulation S-B on February 4, 2008. The sharp differentiator is structural form: SRC is a filer status that scales disclosure inside standard forms (S-1, 10-K, 10-Q), not a separate form. Its eligibility cutoff (originally $75 million public float, later expanded with a revenue prong) is materially broader than SB-1's $25 million test, so the post-2008 population of scaled-disclosure filers is wider and not directly comparable.

Form SB-1/A amendments

Amendments to previously filed SB-1 registration statements. The sharp differentiator is role, not regime: same issuer cohort, same disclosure rules, same offering ceiling, but reflecting staff comment responses, updated financials, or revised terms. SB-1/A is the amendment layer of the SB-1 dataset, not a separate comparison universe.

What makes the SB-1 dataset distinct

Four features together prevent clean substitution from any other source:

  • $10 million offering ceiling (capped, unlike SB-2 and S-1; registration-based, unlike Regulation A's exemption caps).
  • $25 million eligibility test (far stricter than the SRC threshold that replaced it).
  • Regulation S-B financial statements (a retired disclosure regime, not equivalent to Regulation S-X with SRC scaling).
  • Closed window: June 1996 to February 2008 (complete and static; no new filings).

For the smallest U.S. registered offerings in the late 1990s and 2000s, SB-1 is the precise dataset. Pair with SB-2 for broader small-issuer coverage in the same window; pivot to S-1-with-SRC or Form 1-A for continuity afterward. No single alternative reproduces SB-1's exact combination of cap, eligibility test, disclosure regime, and time window.

Who Uses This Dataset

Because Form SB-1 was retired in February 2008, the dataset is inherently retrospective. It serves professionals reconstructing the pre-2008 small-issuer registration record under the discontinued Regulation S-B regime.

Securities lawyers and disclosure counsel

Counsel pull historical SB-1 and SB-1/A chains to confirm what a specific issuer disclosed at the time of registration and how language was revised through staff comment cycles. The prospectus risk factors, plan of operations, related-party notes, and selling shareholder tables drive drafting precedent for current smaller reporting company filings, scaled disclosure questions, and Section 11 defense work tied to pre-2008 offerings.

Academic researchers in securities regulation and entrepreneurial finance

Researchers treat the bounded SB-1 corpus as a closed population for empirical work on small-issuer capital formation, scaled disclosure outcomes, and the transition to the Smaller Reporting Company framework. The Reg S-B financial statements, business descriptions, and use-of-proceeds tables feed structured datasets; metadata.json filer identifiers support linkage to other historical SEC corpora for survivorship and longitudinal studies.

Financial and regulatory historians

Historians use prospectus narratives, signature pages, and exhibit lists as primary sources documenting small-cap capital formation across the dot-com cycle, the post-Sarbanes-Oxley adjustment, and the run-up to the form's 2008 discontinuation. Underwriter and placement-agent identification on cover pages and signature blocks anchors institutional history of the small-issuer ecosystem.

Regulatory and policy analysts

Analysts at securities regulators and SROs use the closed corpus to study how a deliberately simplified disclosure regime was actually used. SB-1/A amendment chains expose recurring deficiencies; offering-size distributions against the $10 million ceiling and Reg S-B schedule completeness inform retrospective reviews of disclosure scaling and small-issuer accommodation policy.

Diligence teams tracing issuer histories

Diligence practices at law firms and advisory shops consult the dataset when a current OTC issuer or acquisition target traces its public history to an SB-1 registration. The original prospectus is often the earliest public record of founders' equity, promoter relationships, predecessor entities, and early material contracts filed as exhibits. Dilution and selling shareholder tables anchor capitalization reconstruction; exhibits surface legacy obligations that may still bind a successor.

Capital markets and small-cap M&A advisors

Bankers and advisors evaluating a follow-on, reverse merger, or take-private involving a legacy registrant use the SB-1 use-of-proceeds, original business plan, and SB-1/A amendment progression to assess track record and prior investor representations. For shell company analysis, the original statement of business purpose and the trajectory of amendments distinguish operating issuers from vehicles.

Audit and assurance teams on legacy issuers

Audit teams engaged on issuers with financial history reaching into the Reg S-B period work from the as-filed financial statements, auditor reports, and footnotes prepared under Regulation S-B rather than full Regulation S-X. Auditor consents in the exhibit list and any restated statements in SB-1/A filings support successor auditor reviews, restatements, and reissuance of comparatives.

Securities litigation experts and forensic accountants

Litigation teams and testifying experts in Section 11 and Section 12 matters rely on accession-level metadata to fix filing chronology for statute of limitations, scienter, and reliance arguments. They cite exact prospectus language across SB-1 and SB-1/A iterations to establish what was disclosed when, while forensic accountants test Reg S-B financial statements, related-party notes, and use-of-proceeds tables against subsequent conduct.

Microcap fraud investigators

Investigators mapping historical pump-and-dump and shell-chain networks use selling shareholder tables, control-person disclosures, signatory lists, and exhibits identifying counsel and accountants to surface repeat actors active during the SB-1 era. The fixed dataset supports reference indexes that can be cross-referenced against later enforcement actions.

Data engineering and retrieval/LLM teams

Teams building historical SEC corpora and retrieval systems use the dataset as a finite, stable collection with consistent Reg S-B structure. The metadata.json supplies accession numbers, form types, filer identifiers, and filing dates for indexing; TXT, HTML, and PDF documents support text extraction, section segmentation, and embeddings for benchmarking and training-set construction.

Across these roles, the prospectus narrative, Reg S-B financial statements, use-of-proceeds and selling shareholder sections, exhibit set, SB-1/A amendment chains, and accession-level metadata are the load-bearing parts of the record.

Specific Use Cases

The following workflows describe how practitioners read specific record components to reconstruct the small-issuer registration record from this closed corpus.

  • Reconstructing a full SB-1 amendment chain for litigation chronology. Securities litigation experts working Section 11 and Section 12 matters tied to a pre-2008 small-issuer offering pull every accession sharing a 333-... fileNo from metadata.json entities[], sort by filedAt, and diff prospectus risk factor and use-of-proceeds language across the SB-1 and successive SB-1/A primary documents. The output is a dated disclosure timeline citing exact wording per accession, used to fix what was said when for statute-of-limitations and reliance arguments.

  • Building a structured Reg S-B financials panel for academic research. Researchers in entrepreneurial finance parse the Item 310 financial statements (two-year balance sheets, statements of operations, cash flows) embedded in the SB-1 primary HTML or TXT document and cross-link to filer fields in entities[] (cik, sic, stateOfIncorporation, fiscalYearEnd). Where financials live in GRAPHIC images excluded from the ZIP, they refetch via the preserved documentUrl. The resulting panel supports survivorship and capital-formation studies on the bounded SB-1 population.

  • Diligence on a current OTC issuer that traces back to an SB-1 registration. Diligence counsel locate the original SB-1 by cik in metadata.json, read the prospectus selling-shareholder and dilution tables to reconstruct founders' equity and promoter holdings, and pull EX-10.x material contracts and EX-3.x charter documents from the accession folder for legacy obligations that may still bind a successor. Output is a capitalization and contract inventory feeding the diligence memo for a reverse merger or take-private.

  • Drafting precedent retrieval for current smaller reporting company filings. Disclosure counsel query the SB-1 corpus by sic industry code in entities[] to surface peer prospectus risk factors, plan-of-operation narratives, and related-party notes from issuers in the same line of business. Excerpts from the registration statement body are imported into current S-1 and 10-K drafts as starting language for scaled-disclosure sections.

  • Microcap repeat-actor mapping across the SB-1 era. Fraud investigators extract signatory names, control-person disclosures, and selling-shareholder tables from the prospectus body, plus counsel and accountant identities from EX-5 legal opinions and EX-23 accountant consents. Names are clustered across accessions and joined to later enforcement actions to surface promoters, shell-formation lawyers, and audit firms that recur across multiple SB-1 registrations.

  • Indexing a finite SEC corpus for historical retrieval and LLM benchmarking. Data engineering teams iterate the monthly ZIPs, read each metadata.json for accessionNo, formType, filedAt, entities[], and documentFormatFiles[], and parse the SGML-wrapped TXT and HTML documents into section-segmented text. Because the corpus is closed and Regulation S-B is structurally consistent, the output is a stable, reproducible benchmark set for prospectus section classification, exhibit-type tagging, and retrieval evaluation.

  • Auditor-transition review on legacy registrants. Successor audit teams engaged on issuers with history in the Reg S-B period read the as-filed financial statements and footnotes from the primary document together with EX-23 consents across the SB-1/A chain. The amendment-by-amendment progression of restated comparatives and changed accountant consents documents prior auditor turnover and supports reissuance of comparatives under current standards.

Dataset Access

Dataset Index JSON API: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-sb1-files.json

This endpoint returns the dataset metadata, the full dataset download URL, and the list of all container files with per-container size, record count, updated timestamp, and download URL. Use it to monitor which monthly containers were touched in the most recent refresh run and decide which containers to download incrementally. This endpoint does not require an API key.

Example
1 {
2 "datasetId": "1f13365b-9ae0-69c6-9451-17f19c73fdc4",
3 "datasetDownloadUrl": "https:/api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-sb1-files.zip",
4 "name": "Form SB-1 Files Dataset",
5 "updatedAt": "2026-04-15T12:20:57.346Z",
6 "earliestSampleDate": "1996-06-01",
7 "totalRecords": 2711,
8 "totalSize": 45346665,
9 "formTypes": ["SB-1", "SB-1/A"],
10 "containerFormat": "ZIP",
11 "fileTypes": ["TXT", "JSON", "HTML", "PDF", "XFD"],
12 "containers": [
13 {
14 "downloadUrl": "https:/api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-sb1-files/2007/2007-12.zip",
15 "key": "2007/2007-12.zip",
16 "size": 1842310,
17 "records": 14,
18 "updatedAt": "2026-04-15T12:20:57.346Z"
19 }
20 ]
21 }

Download Entire Dataset: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-sb1-files.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY

Downloads the complete Form SB-1 Files Dataset as a single ZIP archive covering all filings from June 1996 through the form's discontinuation in February 2008. This endpoint requires an API key.

Download Single Container: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-sb1-files/2007/2007-12.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY

Downloads one monthly ZIP container with all SB-1 and SB-1/A filings submitted in that month, instead of the full dataset. This endpoint requires an API key.

Frequently Asked Questions

What forms does this dataset cover?

The dataset covers Form SB-1 (an original Securities Act of 1933 registration statement filed by a small business issuer for a public cash offering of up to $10 million) and Form SB-1/A (amendments to a previously filed SB-1). No other form types are included.

What does one record represent?

One record is a single EDGAR submission of either Form SB-1 or Form SB-1/A, keyed by accession number. Each record is one folder containing a metadata.json manifest plus every retained document — the primary registration statement and its exhibits — for that submission.

Who was eligible to file Form SB-1?

Only U.S. or Canadian operating companies meeting the SEC's "small business issuer" definition under Item 10 of Regulation S-B: revenues and public float each below $25 million, not an investment company, and not a majority-owned subsidiary of a non-small-business parent. Foreign private issuers outside Canada and investment companies were ineligible regardless of size.

What time period does the dataset cover, and is it still growing?

The dataset covers EDGAR submissions from June 1, 1996 through Form SB-1's discontinuation on February 4, 2008. It is a closed historical corpus: no SB-1 or SB-1/A filings have been made since the SEC rescinded Regulation S-B and the SB-series under Release 33-8876, so the dataset does not grow with new filings.

What file formats are included, and what is excluded?

The distributed file types are TXT, JSON, HTML, PDF, and XFD (XFDL fillable-form facsimiles), packaged in monthly ZIP containers. Image files referenced by the filing as GRAPHIC document entries (such as embedded financial-statement screenshots, prospectus diagrams, and signature-page scans) are intentionally excluded from the ZIP, although they remain enumerated in metadata.json with their original EDGAR documentUrl for separate retrieval.

Use the 333-… Securities Act file number stored as fileNo inside entities[] in metadata.json. Every SB-1/A in an amendment chain shares the same fileNo as the original SB-1, even though the accession numbers and monthly archives differ. The cik alone is not sufficient, because a single issuer may have filed multiple unrelated registrations.

How does this dataset differ from Form SB-2?

SB-1 and SB-2 share the same small-business-issuer eligibility and the same Regulation S-B disclosure schedule, and both were discontinued in February 2008. The decisive difference is the offering ceiling: SB-1 capped registered offerings at $10 million per rolling twelve months, while SB-2 had no cap. SB-2 was the dominant form in practice; SB-1 represents the smaller subset of issuers who accepted the cap in exchange for the lighter prospectus.

Is there XBRL data in this dataset?

No. Regulation S-B small-business issuers were outside the XBRL tagging mandate during Form SB-1's life, and the linkToXbrl and dataFiles[] fields in metadata.json are empty across the entire corpus.