Funds and Benchmarks are two halves of one job. Funds tells you what a vehicle did. Benchmarks tells you whether that was any good.
Neither is useful without the other, which is why this topic covers them together and why the platform puts them next to each other in the rail.
The fund record
A fund carries its manager, strategy, geography, vintage year, size and the performance measures that matter for a closed-end vehicle: IRR, MOIC, DPI and TVPI. The mechanics track explains what each one means and where each one lies; this is where you read them on a real vehicle.
Vintage is the field to respect most. A fund is a cohort, and comparing a 2015 vehicle to a 2021 vehicle is comparing a fund that has exited into a good market to one that has barely finished deploying.
Why the benchmark is the product
A manager will always be able to show you a good number. They choose which fund, which measure and which window. A benchmark removes that choice by fixing the comparison: same vintage, same strategy, same geography, and then asking where in the distribution this manager sits.
Quartile placement within the right cell is the single most portable judgement in private markets, and it is the thing an IC memo should lead with.
Reading a distribution honestly
Two cautions the platform cannot enforce for you. First, private market returns are computed on marks until they are not, so an unrealised TVPI on a young fund is an opinion with a decimal point. DPI is the number that has actually happened.
Second, thin cells lie. A benchmark built on a handful of funds in a narrow geography and vintage will produce a confident-looking median that a single outlier moves. Check what a cell is built from before you let a quartile decide anything.
Fundraising: the forward view
Where Funds is the historical record, Fundraising is what is in market now. For an LP it is the pipeline of what can actually be committed to this year. For a GP it is the competitive picture: who else is raising into the same allocation, at what size, and how long they have been out.