In private equity, performance isn’t just a scoreboard. It’s the foundation for everything. Your track record shapes how LPs see you, how deals come your way, and how your firm positions itself in a competitive market.
But while public market managers can instantly measure results against the S&P 500 or other indices, private equity firms are left without a clear reference point. It’s one of the industry’s most persistent pain points: How do we really know how we stack up?
For years, a credible, centralized source of private fund performance data has felt like the holy grail. Something everyone’s looking for, but no one can seem to find. Until now.
In this article,
Why Seeing Competitor Performance Really Matters
For private equity firms, performance visibility isn’t about curiosity, it’s about context. Without knowing how you compare to peer funds, even a strong track record can feel like a shot in the dark.
The ability to benchmark against competitors strengthens your story. When you’re in a fundraising process, LPs aren’t just evaluating your numbers. They’re weighing them against others on the market. Knowing exactly where you stand allows you to position your performance with confidence.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Competitive benchmarks help shape your broader strategy… whether that means refining your sector focus, adjusting fund size, or understanding where you’ve truly outperformed. It’s also about signaling. In a crowded fundraising environment, credible outperformance can be a real differentiator. The better you can tell that story, with data to back it up, the stronger your position becomes.
Why This Has Been So Hard to Solve
The problem isn’t that fund performance doesn’t exist. It’s that the data is fragmented, selectively disclosed, and difficult to trust at scale.
There’s no central repository for private equity performance, no Bloomberg or Morningstar equivalent. Instead, information is spread across LP reports, consultant databases, regulatory filings, and internal presentations. Some firms highlight strong vintages and keep the rest quiet, which creates an incomplete picture. Even when you can find data, differences in methodology (IRR vs. TVPI, gross vs. net) make direct comparisons difficult.
The result is a messy landscape. For firms trying to benchmark their performance, it’s time-consuming, inconsistent, and often unreliable. And that lack of clarity doesn’t just impact fundraising. It limits the ability to plan, evaluate, and grow strategically.
How Dakota Marketplace Brings Clarity to Performance Benchmarking
At Dakota, we’ve worked closely with private equity firms, and we’ve heard the same thing over and over: “We just want a clean way to see where we stand.”
That’s exactly what we’ve built into Dakota Marketplace.
Our Private Fund Performance Benchmarks are curated from a dataset of over 28,000 private funds across private equity, credit, venture capital, real estate, infrastructure, and energy. Each fund’s performance is standardized using consistent inputs and methodologies, so firms can finally make true apples-to-apples comparisons.
This isn’t just a static dataset, it’s part of a broader intelligence platform. Benchmarks live alongside data on 128,000+ sponsor-backed companies, 29,000+ non-sponsor-backed companies, and 20,000+ private transactions. That integration gives firms the full picture, not just how they’ve performed, but how that performance connects to the market around them.
For private equity teams, the ability to understand how you stack up isn’t a “nice to have.” It’s core to how you compete, tell your story, and win trust with LPs and partners. Dakota brings that clarity to your fingertips.
See Where You Stand
The private equity world has long searched for a credible, consistent way to benchmark fund performance. With Dakota Benchmarks, that search doesn’t have to continue.
Book a demo of Dakota Marketplace to see how we’re bringing transparency to private fund performance and giving PE firms the competitive intelligence they’ve been waiting for.
