Data sourced from Dakota Private Markets, the private fund performance platform powered by Dakota. Learn More | Request Access
Most allocators open a private fund database with the same three questions: what is the net IRR, what is the TVPI, and is this manager top quartile? Those are the right starting points. They are rarely the whole story.
Our research team works inside the Dakota Private Markets database every day, and the most useful pulls are often the ones allocators don’t think to ask for, either because older platforms never offered them or because they sit one click past the headline number.
In this article, we’re sharing ten of our favorite things to pull from the Dakota Private Markets database. By the end, you’ll have a list of data points to add to your next manager review that most of your peers aren’t looking at yet.
Most benchmarks stop at asset class, strategy, and vintage. That puts a software-focused buyout fund in the same cohort as an industrials-focused one, two very different return profiles. Dakota Private Markets adds a fifth layer: the sector of the underlying portfolio companies, across 13 sector filters. It is the fastest way to see whether a manager is genuinely top quartile or just benefiting from a broad peer group.
A pitch deck shows a composite. We pull the full fund series, Fund I through the current raise, with each fund ranked against its own vintage-specific peers. That shows whether the manager’s relative performance is improving, holding, or slipping, which a single blended number can hide completely.
Two funds can both show a 1.6x TVPI and tell opposite stories. One has returned most of that as cash. The other is still carrying it at the manager’s own marks. Pulling DPI and RVPI side by side tells you how much of the performance has actually been proven.
A fund that has called 40% of commitments and one that has called 95% can post identical multiples. Called percentage sits outside the standard metrics, so it often gets skipped. We pull it alongside every young fund’s numbers to put early returns in context before anyone reads too much into them.
A 14% net IRR looks strong until you compare it to what the same cash flows would have earned in the public markets over the same period. PME answers the question every investment committee eventually asks, “did we get paid for the illiquidity?”, and it is available right next to IRR and TVPI.
Dakota Private Markets holds 159,000+ performance records across 18,000+ private funds, with Net IRR, TVPI, DPI, RVPI, PME, and quartile rank on named funds, every record reviewed by Dakota’s research team before publication. Request Access.
Semi-liquid vehicles are growing fast, but most legacy databases were built for closed-end funds and either skip evergreen and interval vehicles or force them into an IRR framework they don’t fit. Dakota Private Markets tracks 300+ of them on annualized returns across YTD, one, three, five, and ten year horizons, plus liquidity terms, so you can compare them to their closed-end peers on fair footing.
Dakota Private Markets surfaces fee data from public pension disclosures, showing how management fees and carried interest break down across PE, credit, real estate, and infrastructure. That gives allocators a real-world reference point for fee negotiations, and it is a side of the data most people never think to check. Our breakdown of what those disclosures actually show is a good place to start.
A return figure is more useful when you can see what backs it up. The Dakota Private Markets document repository holds 15,000+ consultant reviews, pension due diligence documents, and fund presentations. We pull these alongside performance history to see how other allocators and consultants have evaluated the same manager before we ever take a meeting.
A fund’s stated strategy and its actual holdings don’t always match. We cross-reference a GP’s profile against its tracked portfolio companies and the transactions behind them, including the lenders, advisors, and counsel on each deal, to confirm the manager is doing what the deck says it does.
GP-led secondaries are everywhere, and the marketed valuation is only as good as the funds underneath it. We pull named performance history on the one or two funds tied to the deal and benchmark each against a constructed peer group. It is a fast sanity check that doesn’t require a broad enterprise subscription to answer a narrow question.
Pick one manager on your current pipeline and run all ten. Build the sector-filtered peer group, pull the full fund series, split the TVPI into DPI and RVPI, check called capital and PME, then read the consultant reviews and portfolio holdings behind the numbers. You’ll walk into the meeting knowing things about the manager that most allocators across the table won’t.
Dakota Private Markets covers 18,000+ private funds across seven asset classes, plus evergreen and interval vehicles, GP and sponsor intelligence, private company transactions, and a 15,000+ document repository. Every record is sourced from public filings, LP disclosures, and direct manager reporting, then reviewed by Dakota’s 60-person research team before it is published.
See what you’ve been missing, request access to Dakota Private Markets.