Free VC Fund Performance Data: IRR, TVPI, DPI Without a Bloomberg Terminal

$31,980 a year is what one Bloomberg Terminal seat costs in 2026 — and you don't need it to see real VC fund IRR, TVPI, and DPI benchmarks.

That's the short answer. The longer answer is that the best VC performance data isn't locked behind a terminal at all — it's published quarterly, for free, by a fund administrator sitting on 2,500+ real funds and by the industry's two oldest benchmark shops.

Where to Find Free VC Fund Performance Data

Free VC fund performance data — IRR, TVPI, and DPI by vintage year — is available from Carta's Data Desk, Cambridge Associates' quarterly benchmark books, and the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor, with no subscription or sign-up required for any of the three. Carta's dataset pulls from over 2,500 venture funds on its fund administration platform and updates every quarter; Cambridge Associates has tracked institutional VC performance since the 1980s and still releases its index commentary as free downloadable PDFs.

None of this replaces a full PitchBook or Preqin seat if you're running institutional due diligence. But for a GP benchmarking a fund, an LP sanity-checking a manager's pitch, or a founder trying to understand what "top quartile" actually means, the free tier now covers 80% of the use case. Compare your own numbers against live benchmarks on our VC & PE Performance dashboard.

Free vs. Paid: What You Actually Get

The gap between free and paid VC performance data isn't data quality — it's drill-down depth. Free sources give you vintage-year medians and quartiles; paid terminals let you filter by fund manager, strategy, and check size.

Pricing from Vendr procurement data (PitchBook) and costbench.com/godeldiscount.com (Bloomberg Terminal), both 2026. Fund sample sizes from Carta Data Desk and Cambridge Associates' published index methodology, 2025-2026.

What Carta's Free VC Fund Performance Data Actually Shows

Carta's Q1 2026 report is the most current free read on the market: median net TVPI rose for nearly every vintage from 2017 through 2024, with the 2021 and 2022 vintages both reaching 1.02x. Carta funded $3.9B across 86 new funds in the quarter — a sign of continued, if modest, fund formation.

DPI tells a different story than TVPI, and it's the number LPs actually care about. In the 2019 and 2020 vintages, median DPI is still barely above zero, and fewer than half of those funds have returned any capital at all. Even the 2017 and 2018 cohorts — six-plus years old — show median DPIs of just 0.31x and 0.15x, with fewer than 20% of funds past 1x DPI.

Figures are 2026 medians from Carta's Data Desk, drawn from funds using Carta Fund Administration — a sample skewed toward emerging managers and sub-$250M funds rather than the full institutional market.

Cambridge Associates and the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor

Cambridge Associates has run its U.S. Venture Capital Index since the 1980s, now covering the historical performance of 600+ private fund managers across 2,649 institutional-quality funds, built directly from quarterly financial statements. The fully interactive benchmark calculator sits behind a paid relationship, but the quarterly index-and-benchmark-statistics PDF — the same underlying numbers institutional LPs cite in board decks — is free to download from Cambridge Associates' site every quarter.

The PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor is the third leg: a free quarterly report covering fundraising totals, deal counts, valuations, and exit activity that frames the performance numbers in market context. It won't give you manager-level IRR the way a $12,000-$70,000/year PitchBook seat does, but it's the same team producing the market-wide numbers that feed every VC pitch deck's "market backdrop" slide. For a broader read on how fund-level metrics roll up, see our explainer on how VC fund performance is measured.

When You Actually Need a Paid Terminal

Free sources cover vintage-year medians and quartile breakpoints — enough to answer "is my fund top-quartile" or "what should I tell an LP about DPI expectations." They don't give you manager-by-manager comparisons, custom cuts by sector or check size, or real-time updates between quarterly releases.

A $12,000-$70,000/year PitchBook seat or a $31,980/year Bloomberg Terminal earns its cost when you're doing LP-side manager selection across dozens of funds, need portfolio-company-level comps alongside fund performance, or require API access to pull data into internal models. For everyone else — most emerging managers, most founders, most first-time LPs — the free quarterly releases from Carta and Cambridge Associates are the same underlying data at zero cost. Track your own fund's standing against these benchmarks on our Funds dashboard.