Morningstar, the investment research and data firm, has acquired one of the services we use multiple times a day: 10-K Wizard, one of the providers of SEC filings research and alert services, for $12.5 million subject to working capital adjustments. Besides filings itself, 10K has been developing data mining tools to make sense of filings, as well as comparison tools across different filings and time periods. Morningstar will use the service to add to its overall research services…the company also said that 10K’s technology can be applied to documents of all kinds, like mutual fund prospectuses. More details in release. 10K was founded in 1999, and based in Dallas, TX. The service is available via a monthly or yearly subscription.

Update: 10K CEO Martin Zacarias tells me they didn’t have any institutional money in the company. It did a small round with Hoover’s (now D&B) back in 2000, but have since bought them out, leaving owners as the only shareholders.