Four metrics show up on nearly every private fund report. Here's what each one actually measures, how they work together, and where they can mislead you if read in isolation.
Morgan Holycross, Marketing Manager · August 18, 2026
Data sourced from Joe, the private fund performance platform powered by Dakota. Learn More | Request Access
Private fund investing means piecing together fund performance, manager context, and fundraising timelines from sources that don't talk to each other: a database for the numbers, LinkedIn for the people, a spreadsheet for tracking it all. Most of the actual work isn't evaluating a fund, it's finding and verifying the information needed to evaluate it in the first place.
Joe, Powered by Dakota was built around five specific points where that process breaks down.
In this article, we're covering the five biggest friction points in private fund research, and how Joe addresses each one. By the end, you'll know where the real time sink is, and what closes the gap.
A new fund name lands on your desk, and the research starts from zero: who's managing it, what's their strategy, where's the firm based, and how has it actually performed. Hours go into piecing that together from press releases, LinkedIn profiles, and whatever a placement agent happens to have on file, before a single benchmarking question even gets asked.
Joe puts fund performance and GP and sponsor intelligence on 20,000+ investment firms in the same record, so a fund's Net IRR, TVPI, DPI, and RVPI sit next to the firm's investment thesis, portfolio companies, and team detail instead of requiring three separate lookups.
Most benchmarking databases hand you a number: an anonymized median IRR for a vintage-year cohort, or a quartile ranking against funds you can't actually see. That number doesn't tell you who's running the fund, what they've done before, or whether the team behind this raise is the same one that produced the track record you're looking at.
Joe reports performance at the level of the specific, named fund, connected directly to the GP's profile, so a Net IRR or TVPI comes with the firm context a pooled benchmark strips out: investment thesis, portfolio companies, deal activity, and team detail, all in the same view.
The private fund universe is larger than the handful of names that show up in most databases. Smaller and newer managers raising real capital often don't clear the bar for inclusion in platforms built around the largest, most established funds, which means real opportunities get missed simply because they were never in the dataset to begin with.
Joe tracks 18,000+ funds across seven asset classes, dual-sourced from public filings and direct manager submissions and verified by a research team before anything publishes, so coverage extends past the largest, most-covered names.
See the full coverage for yourself: request access to Joe.
Funds open, funds close, and timelines shift without much warning. Missing the window on a fund that's actively raising means missing the opportunity entirely, and most performance databases are built to show historical results, not who's in the market right now.
Joe tracks funds currently raising capital alongside their historical performance, so a benchmarking question and a live fundraising question get answered from the same record instead of two different sources.
A typical research workflow pulls from a deal-flow database with thin performance history, a benchmarking tool with narrow strategy coverage, and a separate source for GP and transaction context, none of which are built to work together. Reconciling numbers across three systems eats time that should go toward the actual investment decision.
Joe brings fund performance, GP and sponsor intelligence, and private company transaction data into one platform, connected to the same underlying dataset, so building a peer group, checking a GP's history, and reviewing recent deal activity happen in one place instead of three.
Private fund research doesn't have to mean stitching together a database, a search engine, and a spreadsheet. Joe, Powered by Dakota brings fund performance, GP and sponsor intelligence, and transaction data together in one place, priced at $9,500 a year for up to five users.
Request access to see how much of that research time it actually saves.
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