How the database is built.

Most of the database comes from two filings that private funds and companies make with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The rest comes from limited partners’ own reports and from what firms and allocators say about themselves on their own sites.

SEC Form D

The notice a fund or company files when it sells securities privately. A fund’s Form D gives its size, how much it has sold, how many investors it has admitted, its minimum investment and the people who sign it. A company’s Form D describes a financing round and names its directors. We read every Form D filed since January 2009, with every amendment.

SEC Form ADV

The adviser registration filed by investment advisers, including the exempt reporting advisers most emerging venture managers file as. It gives assets under management, fund counts and, uniquely among filings, the firm’s own website. We read the full monthly roster.

Limited partners’ reports

Public pensions are required by law to publish their private markets holdings. We read these reports directly for the commitments they record: which fund, how much and which vintage.

Firms’ own websites

What a venture firm publishes about itself: the companies it names in its portfolio, its team and partners. Kept word for word with the page and the date we read it, and always labelled as the firm’s own statement.

Limited partners’ own websites

What an allocator says it invests in, how it defines an emerging manager, how it asks to be approached, and the managers it names as ones it backs, quoted with the page it came from.

Press coverage

News headlines about limited partners’ fund commitments. Press is listed separately as a headline and a link. It helps us find allocators to read, and it never adds to a count.

Public rosters

Lists published by organizations that name women and underrepresented general partners. A roster entry is that organization’s statement. It reaches a firm only when the person it names appears on the firm’s own filings, and only after a person on our team confirms the match.

A company tied to a firm by a filing and a company a firm names on its own website are different kinds of fact. Both are useful, so the database keeps both, labels every row with the kind it is, and never adds them together into one count.

The Limited partners view is built for a manager raising a fund. One row is one allocator. Opening a row shows who else it has backed, with a link to each manager’s site, what it says it invests in, how it defines an emerging manager and how it asks to be approached, each in its own words.

Amounts and dates

These come only from a limited partner’s own published report. Public pensions publish commitments by law, which is why they carry the most detail.

Recent activity

An allocator that has not committed to a fund in three years is flagged, because it is unlikely to be a prospect for a fund raising now.

Allocators only

Placement agents, accelerators and industry networks are listed because managers meet capital through them. They do not commit capital themselves, so they are hidden until you turn off the Allocators only filter.

New allocators

The list grows as allocators are found in reports, on managers’ sites and in press coverage. An allocator found only in press is labelled that way until its own site is read, and a name that may duplicate one already listed waits for a person to review it.

Licensed vendor data

No data from PitchBook, Crunchbase, Dealroom, Tracxn, CB Insights or LinkedIn is stored. The block is enforced in the database itself.

Returns reported by managers

No fund’s own return, multiple or valuation, as its manager reports it, is ever shown in the public database, and none enters the Colibrí 100. Managers’ returns count only inside combined benchmark figures of at least five firms, in their own table labelled as reported by managers, and in the Institute’s aggregate research. A manager sees its own funds’ figures on its private benchmark card.

Inferred demographics

Nothing about a person’s gender, race or ethnicity is ever inferred from a name or a photograph. It is recorded only from that person’s own public statement or a confirmed public roster.

Automatic merges

Two records are not combined into one firm or one allocator without a person confirming it. The one exception is fund families that share a website of their own, which are treated as one firm. We would rather show a firm twice than merge two firms that are different.

Rankings

The database describes firms and allocators. It does not rank or rate them.

Guesses

A figure we cannot trace to a source is left empty rather than estimated or filled with an average.

The Colibrí Fund Benchmark answers one question for a manager or an allocator: is this fund normal for its cohort, and if not, in which direction? It is free, published under the same CC BY 4.0 license as the rest of the database, and every figure names its source and how many funds stand behind it.

Stated by managers

Terms no filing carries, such as management fee, carried interest, GP commitment, recycling, fund term, planned positions, check range, reserves, target ownership and time to final close, as managers give them through Update your record. They are combined anonymously with the cohort only with the manager’s consent and only once five firms in that cohort have added theirs, and they sit in their own column, never beside a filed or LP-published figure.

Reported by managers: net returns

Net IRR, TVPI and DPI that managers give us for each of their funds; a firm with several funds adds each one. Limited partners that publish returns mostly hold larger, established funds, so this is the benchmark for the emerging and smaller funds they rarely report on. These figures are combined anonymously by vintage band, sequence and target, publish a median at five firms, quartiles at twelve funds and the 10th and 90th percentiles at twenty, and no single firm may be more than a fifth of any figure. They sit in their own table, labelled as reported by managers, and are never mixed with LP-published returns. No fund’s own figure is ever shown publicly, and none enters the Colibrí 100 score.

Cohorts

A fund’s cohort is its sequence (Fund I, Fund II, Fund III, Fund IV, Fund V and later), its stated target band (under $10M, $10M to $25M, $25M to $50M, $50M to $100M, $100M to $250M, $250M to $500M, $500M and over), the three-year band in which it first filed, and optionally its region, including all US regions together. Three-year bands match the way limited partners group vintages and keep enough firms in each cohort for a figure to publish. Only pooled venture funds count; special purpose vehicles are left out, a fund filed through several parallel entities counts once, and each fund counts at its latest filing. LP-published returns are shown by vintage band only, because limited partners report funds by name and vintage.

Filters: sector, stage focus, manager and adviser

A biotech fund is not an agriculture fund, so filed fundraising and the share of firms that raise a next fund can also be read by up to two filters at a time, alongside sequence, target and first-filed years. Sector comes from one of two bases that are never merged. As a firm states it: the sectors a firm names on its own site, where a firm that names several counts in each and a firm that names none is left out rather than guessed. In its filed portfolio: at least half of the companies tied to the firm by SEC filings name that industry on their own Form D, which covers fewer firms but rests on nothing the firm says about itself. Stage focus is what a firm states on its own site. Manager follows the Institute’s published emerging manager definition. Adviser is the firm’s Form ADV regime on file: exempt reporting, registered, or none found. The page shows how many firms carry each filter next to it. A filtered cohort is stored only once it has five firms and follows the same publishing rules as every other figure; returns and terms are shown for the whole cohort until enough limited partners and managers report by these filters.

When a figure publishes

A filed figure publishes a median at five firms, quartiles at twelve and the 10th and 90th percentiles at twenty, and no single firm may be more than a fifth of it. An LP-published return figure needs five funds from at least two institutions, because a figure fed by one institution is that institution’s portfolio; its quartiles need twelve funds and its 10th and 90th percentiles twenty. A figure that falls short shows its count and the reason, and the page offers the nearest cohort that publishes, one dimension wider, naming what it widened.

Quarterly releases

The benchmark is released quarterly. The current quarter updates daily and becomes final on the last day of the quarter. A final quarter is a citable record and is never rewritten; a correction appears in the next quarter. The first release is Q3 2026, final on 30 September 2026.

Caveats beside the number

Amount sold and share of target are floors, because many funds never file a closing amendment. Investors on the filing are subscribers counted by the issuer, not limited partners by any institutional definition. Net IRR for young vintages annualises over a short holding period and reads high before distributions begin, so the page says so on the row. Each caveat sits next to the figure it qualifies.