Data sourced from Dakota Marketplace, the global LP and GP intelligence platform trusted by thousands of investment professionals. Learn More | Book a Demo
In the past two years, the world's largest financial institutions have spent billions to own private fund performance data.
BlackRock acquired Preqin for approximately $3.2 billion (Source: BlackRock). S&P Global acquired With Intelligence for $1.8 billion (Source: S&P Global). Morningstar owns PitchBook.
When the biggest names in finance pay these prices for data businesses, they are making a clear statement about where value in private markets now sits.
In this article, we’ll look at why performance data has become the industry's most valuable asset, and how Dakota Marketplace puts that asset directly in your hands.
The Money Is Following the Data
The acquisition wave is not a coincidence. Private markets have moved from a satellite allocation to a core one, often representing 30 to 50% of institutional and family office portfolios. As that capital has flowed in, the ability to measure and compare private fund performance has become one of the most valuable capabilities in finance. Private markets data alone is estimated to be an $8 billion market, growing around 12% per year toward $18 billion by 2030 (Source: BlackRock).
The reason is simple: performance is uneven, and the gap is widening. Top-quartile funds in most private asset classes materially outperform medians and public benchmarks, while bottom-quartile funds often fail even to clear the cost of capital. Knowing which is which is worth a great deal, and it depends entirely on the quality of the underlying data.
Why the Data Is So Hard To Get Right
If performance data is this valuable, why doesn't everyone have it? Because building it is genuinely hard, for four reasons that surface again and again:
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Data fragmentation. Performance lives across GP reports, LP systems, consultants, and multiple commercial databases, with reporting cadences, valuation policies, and fee treatments that differ widely.
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No universal index. There is no S&P 500 of private equity. Benchmarks have to be constructed from fund-level cash flows with consistent methodology.
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Timing and vintage effects. Quarterly marks and long J-curves make young-fund IRRs noisy, and comparing a 2018 mega-buyout fund to a 2011 lower-middle-market fund is meaningless without normalization.
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Opaque peer groups. Most investors see only their own managers plus a sliver of the universe, so quartile labels are often misleading.
That difficulty is exactly why the data commands a premium. Anyone can quote a headline IRR. Far fewer can place it in the context of vintage, strategy, geography, and the specific businesses a fund invests in.
See the asset for yourself. Book a demo to explore performance data on 17,100+ private funds inside Dakota Marketplace and see why structured fund data has become so valuable.
How Dakota Puts the Asset in Your Hands
This is the gap Dakota Marketplace was built to close. Dakota's Private Fund Performance data tracks more than 17,100 private funds across seven asset classes, with Net IRR, TVPI, DPI, and RVPI captured at the fund level and organized by vintage, strategy, geography, and fund size. That structure is what turns a pile of fragmented reports into an asset you can actually use.
Because the data is built this way, our Benchmarking data lets you construct a true peer group and rank a fund within it, down to the sector of the underlying portfolio companies. It solves the four problems above directly: broad coverage instead of a sliver of the universe, a custom-built peer group instead of a rigid index, vintage and strategy normalization built in, and full transparency into the funds behind every benchmark. Our Benchmarking data lets you show that your 2019 direct lending fund is top quartile of its vintage despite the COVID shock and rate reset, something a single-point IRR can never convey without peer context.
Owning the Most Valuable Asset in Private Markets
The market has spoken through its acquisitions: private fund performance data is now among the most valuable assets in finance. And in today's environment, where median performance has compressed and the spread between good and bad managers has widened, high-quality performance and benchmarking data is more valuable than ever.
The firms and investment teams that own it hold a lasting advantage, in diligence, in benchmarking, and in every capital-raising conversation that hinges on how a fund actually performed.
To see how Dakota puts that asset directly in your hands, book a demo of Dakota Marketplace.
