Fund Benchmark

Loading the benchmark

Is a fund normal for its cohort? Choose the cohort a fund belongs to and see where the middle sits and how wide the spread runs. Fundraising figures come from SEC filings. Net returns come from two sources shown side by side and never mixed: what limited partners publish, and what managers share with us in confidence.

Manage a venture fund? See exactly where yours sits.

Your firm already has a private benchmark card built from its filings: your fund placed on every bar below, with a PDF for a data room. Add your returns and terms and the card fills in, and the benchmark gets sharper for every emerging manager.

Open my benchmark cardSee a sample cardAdd my fund's numbers

How to read a benchmark bar

Every measure below is drawn as one bar, so the whole cohort fits in a glance.

  1. The blue mark is the median, the fund in the middle: half sit above it, half below.
  2. The dark box is the middle half of funds, from the 25th to the 75th percentile.
  3. The thin line runs from the 10th to the 90th percentile, so one fund in ten sits beyond each end.
  4. The grey bar underneath is every fund, so you can see at once whether a cohort runs higher or lower than the market.
The benchmark is only as good as what managers share.

Limited partners who publish returns mostly hold larger, established funds. Emerging and smaller funds are the ones missing, and they are the ones this benchmark exists for. Every fund that adds its numbers makes every cohort more accurate, and yours is never shown on its own.

Add my fund's numbers
The benchmark uses no licensed vendor data. Figures from filings, figures limited partners publish, and figures managers share are three separate sources, each labelled, and never mixed into one number. A median needs five firms, quartiles need twelve and the 10th and 90th percentiles need twenty; no single firm may be more than a fifth of any figure, and an LP-published return also needs two institutions. What a manager shares is combined anonymously with other managers' figures and never shown on its own. Where a figure falls short we show the count and the reason, because a visible gap is more useful than a silent one. Each quarter's benchmark updates daily and becomes final on the last day of the quarter, and a final quarter is never rewritten. How every figure is built is on the database methodology page. Data: Colibrí Institute. Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0.