How Dakota Benchmarks Turn Performance Data Into Decisions

April 29, 2026

How Dakota Benchmarks Turn Performance Data Into Decisions

4:45

A 15% net IRR can be top quartile or median depending entirely on the peer group it's measured against. That single fact explains why benchmarking has become one of the most contested steps in private markets diligence and fundraising.

The number on the page is rarely the issue. The reference point is.

For decades, fund managers and allocators have relied on benchmarks built by someone else: a vendor's predetermined peer group, a manager's self-selected comparison set, or a generic "mid-market buyout" universe that bundles funds with fundamentally different strategies, sizes, and geographies.

Dakota Benchmarks was built to fix that. It puts performance data on more than 14,000 private funds inside Dakota Marketplace and lets you define the peer group yourself.

In this article we’ll go over how Dakota Benchmarks turns performance data into decisions for you and your team.

What Dakota Benchmarks Covers

Dakota Benchmarks tracks net IRR, TVPI, and DPI across more than 14,000 private funds spanning private equity, private credit, venture capital, private real estate, real assets, and hedge funds. RVPI is on the roadmap. The dataset includes:

Private Equity: small, middle, and large market buyout
Private Credit: direct lending, mezzanine, opportunistic
Venture Capital: early, growth, multi-stage
Private Real Estate: core, core+, value-add, opportunistic, credit
Real Assets: infrastructure, energy, natural resources

Quartiles and medians calculate automatically against whatever universe you've filtered to. Filters span strategy, asset class, vintage year, geography, industry, and sector. Every result is exportable to Excel for further diligence and internal analysis.

Build Your True Peer Group

Generic benchmarks hide the differences that matter. A lower mid-market healthcare buyout fund compared against a broad mid-market index isn't a useful comparison. It's noise dressed up as analysis.

Dakota Benchmarks lets you build custom peer sets fund by fund. Filter the universe down to lower middle market buyout, narrow to vintages 2021 through 2023, and you have 249 funds to work with. Toggle between Net IRR, TVPI, and DPI to see how the rankings shift. Add or remove specific strategies to construct the exact comparison set your fund actually competes against. The calculation table sits one click away, so the math behind the quartiles is always visible.

We want you to move as fast as possible from "what's the peer group" to "where does this fund actually rank."

Stop relying on someone else's peer group. Build the comparison set your fund actually competes against, with Net IRR, TVPI, and DPI quartiles updated as new performance data comes in. See Dakota Benchmarks in action.

How Fund Managers and Allocators Use It

For investment teams and allocators: evaluate commitments against a relevant peer set, support investment committee discussions and reporting with verified data, and conduct an initial screen on any manager before committing significant diligence resources. Cross-reference manager-provided benchmarks against an independent dataset.

For sales and IR teams: position fund performance against a defensible peer group ahead of LP meetings, answer investor questions in real time with relevant comparisons, and walk in knowing exactly where you rank before anyone asks. Managers can also submit their own performance data for inclusion through Dakota's submission portal.

The differentiator isn't just the dataset.

It's that the benchmarking sits inside Dakota Marketplace alongside the manager research, allocator targeting, transaction tracking, and portfolio company intelligence you're already using. Performance context, deal context, and allocator context live in one place.

Run Your Next Benchmark in Dakota!

The next time you're evaluating a commitment, defending fund performance to an LP, or pressure-testing a manager-provided peer set, build the comparison group yourself. Filter by strategy, vintage, geography, and fund size to construct the universe your fund actually competes against, then export the table to Excel for your IC memo or pitch deck.

Private fund benchmarking has been opaque for as long as the asset class has existed. Dakota Benchmarks is one piece of a broader effort to make private markets intelligence usable for the people actually making allocation, fundraising, and diligence decisions, not just the institutions with seven-figure data budgets.

Book a demo to see Dakota Benchmarks in action, or submit your fund's performance to be included in the dataset!

Written By: Morgan Holycross, Marketing Manager

Morgan Holycross is a Marketing Manager at Dakota.

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How Dakota Benchmarks Turn Performance Data Into Decisions