PitchBook blog

Allocating capital is difficult—and takes conviction. You need to be sure of your decisions and trust that you’ve diligently compared fund strategy and performance. 

Understanding why one fund is out-performing another or how funds of the same strategy perform over time is critical for finding high-performing vehicles. But, flipping back and forth between webpages takes time and risks important details getting lost in the shuffle.

Our new Fund Families feature creates a seamless way for clients to compare funds within a specific family, different fund strategies and spot open investment opportunities. Additionally, we’ve created charts for analysis that allow our clients to quickly benchmark the performance of a fund over time, relative both to its peer group and the other funds of the same family.

This feature leverages PitchBook's high-quality data to help our clients make allocation decisions, while simultaneously working to maximize returns and save time. Before we jump into specifics, we need to answer an important question: what is a fund family?

What is a fund family?

A series of funds that share the same strategy, geography and financial sponsor is what we call a fund family. Typically funds in a family will follow a similar naming convention (e.g. Fund II, Fund III and Fund IV), although there are some exceptions. 

The idea of fund families, despite existing for a long time, has not had a widely accepted terminology within the private markets. At PitchBook, however, we have used this phrase for private market funds—and are coining it for use within the private markets. You can learn more about fund families in our recent blog. 

 

See the performance of a fund family over time

Our clients can easily and quickly compare open funds to historical funds of the same strategy to better understand how well they have performed over time, using metrics such as IRR or cash flow multiples, including DPI, TVPI and RVPI.

Compare fund families and assess open opportunities in the market

Beyond just comparing the performance of fund families from the same GP, investors can easily compare the performance against PitchBook's defined peer group. 

This feature also calls out when a specific strategy has an open fund enabling our clients to quickly find and act on investment opportunities.

View the breadth of fund families and see which are most active

Funds are organized by strategy or family (rather than listed individually) within a profile to allow users to more easily explore a GP’s different strategies. Each strategy is expandable, showing the underlying funds that make up that family/strategy.

Stay high level with a birds-eye view of all the different strategies/fund families that a GP has or zoom in and focus only on similar strategies. This can show which funds are the most active or which have performed the greatest over time. 


Returns are a top priority for our clients—and our client’s priorities are our priorities. Making confident allocation decisions starts with benchmarking fund strategies and performance. 
 

Ready to explore Fund Families?

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