If you're investing in private equity, venture capital, private credit, or any other private market asset class, you've likely asked yourself the same question: How do we know if this performance is actually good?
It’s a fair question—and an incredibly difficult one to answer.
Unlike public markets, where performance can be measured against well-established benchmarks like the S&P 500 or Bloomberg Barclays Aggregate Index, private markets offer no universally accepted standard. The data is hard to find. And even when you do find it, it’s often inconsistent, outdated, or simply incomparable.
This lack of transparency doesn’t just create frustration. It limits how effectively investors can allocate capital, assess managers, or explain performance to stakeholders. And while there’s been progress over the years, the fundamental barriers to building reliable benchmarks in private markets remain stubbornly in place.
In this article, we’ll go over four key reasons why reliable private fund benchmarks are so hard to come by and why this challenge has persisted for so long. By the end of this, you’ll have a better understanding of the structural issues behind the benchmarking gap and what it takes to solve them.
1. Reporting Standards Are Inconsistent and Often Confusing
At the core of the problem is a lack of consistency. There’s no standard rulebook for how private funds report performance. One manager might focus on IRR, another on TVPI or DPI. Some include fees, others don’t. One may report quarterly, while another updates figures annually.
Even valuation practices vary. Because private companies aren’t marked to market daily, managers use their own assumptions to value portfolio companies—and those assumptions can have a big impact on reported returns.
The result is a landscape where numbers might look precise but are rarely comparable. For anyone trying to build a reliable benchmark, it’s like trying to fit puzzle pieces from different sets.
2. Performance Data Is Scattered Across Dozens of Sources
Even if methodologies were aligned, the data itself would still be hard to collect. Private fund performance information is scattered across LP reports, regulatory filings, consultant databases, academic studies, and third-party surveys. Each source might tell part of the story, but none offer the full picture.
To make matters more difficult, much of this information is gated… confidential to the LP, behind paywalls, or shared only with select partners. For investors trying to get a comprehensive view, the work of tracking and reconciling this fragmented data can be overwhelming and, at times, impossible.
3. Transparency in Private Markets Is Still the Exception
Despite growing interest in data-driven decision making, private markets remain, in many ways, guarded. General partners often hesitate to share fund-level performance for competitive or reputational reasons. Strong vintages are highlighted; weaker ones tend to stay out of sight.
In an industry where relationships matter, there’s still a cultural resistance to full transparency. This means that even when performance data is available, it may not be evenly disclosed across a manager’s track record, or across the broader market.
This selective visibility makes benchmarking feel like a guessing game. And for investors trying to assess relative performance, it adds another layer of uncertainty.
4. Even When You Get the Data, It’s Often Outdated
Private fund performance isn’t just hard to access, it’s often stale by the time it becomes available. Most funds report quarterly, with a lag of 60 to 90 days. That delay, combined with the illiquidity of underlying assets, means that performance metrics are almost always backward-looking.
This time lag is especially problematic in fast-moving sectors like venture capital, where market dynamics can change quickly. Investors may be making allocation decisions based on performance snapshots that are months out of date… at best.
The Bottom Line
The difficulty of accessing reliable benchmarks isn’t a minor issue, it’s a structural challenge that has shaped how private markets operate for decades. Without standardized, timely, and comprehensive performance data, investors are left navigating with limited visibility.
At Dakota, we saw this gap clearly. That’s why we built Private Fund Performance Benchmarks into Dakota Marketplace.
By curating performance intelligence from more than 28,000 funds and applying consistent methodologies across vintages, strategies, and geographies, we’re helping investors get a clearer, more actionable view of performance. Our benchmarks are integrated alongside data on 128,000+ sponsor-backed companies, 29,000+ non-sponsor-backed companies, and 20,000+ private transactions giving users a 360 view of the private market ecosystem.
If you’ve struggled with the lack of clarity around fund performance, you’re not alone. But there’s a better way forward.
Book a demo of Dakota Marketplace to see how we’re bringing clarity to private fund performance.
