Data sourced from Dakota Private Markets, the private fund performance platform powered by Dakota. Learn More | Request Access
Every fund manager eventually hears the same question from an LP: “How does that compare?” A 17% Net IRR sounds strong on its own. Put it next to funds from the same vintage and strategy, and it might be top quartile, or it might be middle of the pack.
Without the right peer group, performance numbers are just numbers.
The problem is that building a credible peer comparison has always been slow. It means sourcing data, cleaning it, filtering to the right vintage and strategy, and calculating quartiles by hand.
And even after all that work, the people on the other side of the table rarely know which funds actually made up the benchmark.
That is exactly why we built the Peer Performance Calculator inside Dakota Private Markets.
In this article, we’ll walk through what the calculator does, how to run a benchmark in five steps, and how fund managers and investment teams can put the results to work. By the end, you’ll know how to see where your fund ranks among its true peers in seconds.
What the Peer Performance Calculator Does
The Peer Performance Calculator lives under the Fund Performance & Comparison tab in Dakota. Enter your fund’s Net IRR, TVPI, or both, and the calculator compares them against Dakota’s private fund peer groups for funds of the same vintage year, asset class, and sub-asset class.
Results come back instantly. No spreadsheets, no manual calculations, and no guessing about whether your comparison set is apples to apples.
How to Run a Benchmark in Five Steps
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Select your vintage year. Vintage is the foundation of any fair comparison, since funds launched in different years face different entry prices, rate environments, and exit markets.
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Choose your asset class. Private equity, venture capital, private credit, private real estate, infrastructure and real assets, and more.
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Refine by sub-asset class (optional). Narrow the peer group further, so a growth equity fund is measured against growth equity, not the entire private equity universe.
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Enter your Net IRR and/or TVPI. Use one metric or both, depending on what you want to evaluate. If you need a refresher on the multiple, here is how TVPI works and why it matters to allocators.
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Click Calculate. Your results appear immediately.
What Your Results Tell You
The calculator returns four numbers that answer the questions allocators actually ask:
- Rank: Where your fund sits among its peers, fund by fund.
- Quartile placement: The shorthand LPs use in every manager review. “Top quartile” is one of the most powerful phrases in a fundraising conversation, and now you can confirm it with data.
- Dakota peer group median: The midpoint of your peer group, so you know what “typical” looks like for your vintage and strategy.
- Difference from the median: Exactly how far above or below the median your fund performs, in IRR points or multiple turns.
Together, these give you a clear, defensible answer to “How does that compare?” before anyone asks.
Stop building peer comparisons by hand. Dakota Private Markets ranks your fund against same-vintage, same-strategy peers in seconds, with full visibility into every fund in the peer group. Request Access.
See Exactly Which Funds You’re Compared Against
Most benchmarks are a black box. You get a median and a quartile cutoff, but no view into the funds behind them. That makes it hard to trust the result, and even harder to defend it when an allocator pushes back. It is one of the biggest reasons private fund performance benchmarks are so hard to find and harder still to rely on.
The Peer Performance Calculator takes a different approach. Click “View the peer funds in this comparison” to see the underlying funds used in your calculation. From there, you can search, filter, and export those records to Excel for deeper analysis.
That transparency matters. You can confirm the peer group makes sense, spot the specific funds you are competing against for capital, and walk into investor conversations knowing exactly what your benchmark is built on.
Take Your Results Into the Room
Once you have your results, use Print to PDF to download them for presentations, quarterly reporting, and internal analysis. The calculator was built for the teams who need these answers most:
- Fund managers can drop peer rankings into pitch decks and data rooms to back up their performance story during a raise.
- Investor relations teams can add quartile context to quarterly LP updates without rebuilding the analysis every period.
- Allocators, consultants, and family offices can quickly test a manager’s numbers against same-vintage peers during due diligence.
Benchmark Your Fund in Dakota Private Markets Today
Benchmarking private fund performance is essential for LPs and GPs, but reliable peer data is often fragmented, expensive, and opaque. Dakota Private Markets changes that.
The platform covers 18,000+ private funds and 159,000+ performance records across 7 asset classes, with Net IRR, TVPI, DPI, and RVPI on every fund record. Every record is reviewed by Dakota’s research team before publication, and peer group data refreshes quarterly so your comparisons stay current.
The Peer Performance Calculator turns all of that data into a single, instant answer: where your fund stands, how far it is from the median, and exactly which peers it is measured against.
How to access it: Fund Performance & Comparison → Peer Performance Calculator. Select your vintage year, asset class, and optional sub-asset class, enter your Net IRR and/or TVPI, and click Calculate.
Don’t have access yet? See how your fund stacks up and request access to Dakota Private Markets.
