Database referenced is Dakota Marketplace, the global LP and GP intelligence platform trusted by thousands of investment professionals. Learn More | Book a Demo
Researching a private fund well comes down to three things: getting reliable data, reading the right metrics, and using a tool that connects the two.
Miss any one of them and the analysis falls apart, a clean metric drawn from an incomplete data source is still misleading, and the best data in the world is hard to act on if it lives in a static quarterly report.
This article walks through how investment professionals research private funds, from where the data comes from to the metrics that matter to the platform that ties it together.
3 Things To Look At For Private Fund Research
Start With The Data Source
Private fund analysis is only as good as the data underneath it. Fund performance has historically been scattered across manager decks, quarterly letters, pension disclosures, and voluntary submissions, each formatted differently and rarely lining up on vintage, strategy, or geography. Pulling those together by hand is slow and leaves gaps.
A dedicated private fund database solves that by centralizing performance into one structured source. Dakota Marketplace tracks more than 17,100 private funds across seven asset classes, from private equity and private credit to venture capital, real estate, infrastructure, hedge funds, and evergreen vehicles. The point is not just volume, it is that every record is organized the same way, so a comparison holds up regardless of which asset class you are working in.
Know Which Metrics To Read
Once the data is reliable, the next step is reading it correctly. Different metrics answer different questions, and no single number tells the full story. The core figures every private fund researcher works with are Net IRR, TVPI, DPI, and RVPI:
- Net IRR shows the annualized return investors actually earned, after fees
- TVPI captures total value created, realized and unrealized, as a multiple of invested capital
- DPI isolates the cash actually returned to investors
- RVPI measures the unrealized value still sitting in the portfolio
Read together, these show not just how a fund performed but how much of that performance is realized versus still on paper. For hedge funds and evergreen vehicles, where a single IRR does not capture the picture, Dakota also tracks annualized performance on a YTD, 1-, 3-, 5-, 10-year, and since-inception basis.
See the data behind the metrics. Book a demo of Dakota Marketplace’s private fund performance data and explore performance across all 17,100+ funds in one place.
Use A Tool That Connects Data To Decisions
Reliable data and the right metrics still need a tool that lets you act on them. This is where a research platform earns its place, by letting you filter the full universe down to the exact question you are trying to answer, then take the result somewhere useful.
Inside Dakota Marketplace, the performance database is filterable by investment style, vintage year, geography, strategy, and fund size, so a researcher can move from 17,100 funds to a precise peer set in a few clicks. From there, Dakota Marketplace’s benchmarking data builds directly on that data, letting you construct a true peer group and see quartile-ranked performance within it. Dakota is the only benchmarking tool that adds portfolio company sector filtering to peer group construction, so a software-focused fund is compared to other software-focused funds rather than an entire broad strategy.
What sets the workflow apart is that the performance data does not sit in isolation. It connects to institutional investor intelligence, GP profiles, and fundraising data in the same platform, so researching a fund's track record flows naturally into researching the managers and allocators around it.
Building a Better Research Process
Strong private fund research is not about any single source, metric, or tool. It is about combining all three: reliable, structured data, the right metrics read in context, and a platform that turns both into decisions. When those pieces live in one place, evaluating a manager, benchmarking a portfolio, or preparing for an investment committee stops being a scavenger hunt and becomes a repeatable process.
To see how investment teams research private funds inside one connected platform, book a demo of Dakota Marketplace.
