VC RETURNS REVEALED: See IRR Performance for 50+ Venture Funds in 2024
We compiled returns data from Insight Partners, Founders Fund, Greenoaks & more.
It’s been a tough few years for the venture capital industry. The lack of exits and a limited supply of hyper-scale startups means most of the big firms are clamoring to invest in a few likely winners, while other startups languish in limbo. We’re starting to see the exit market thaw a little, bringing hope for more cash distributions, but many investments remain illiquid.
With these market conditions in mind, we’re taking a close look at the internal rate of return for over 50 individual venture funds with vintage years from 2017 to 2022, which we obtained from public records requests and other sources.
It would typically be easier to assess performance on older vintages, since it usually takes more than a couple of years for a fund to prove out. The unusual dynamics of the moment though have created their own pattern, with some very recent funds showing big gains while slightly older ones have yet to turn the J-Curve.
Firms including Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, Insight Partners, Lightspeed Venture Capital, and Sequoia have seen healthy markups on certain funds, but not others.
Greenoaks Capital Partners, the former GGV Capital, and Oak HC/FT had positive IRR for funds across the period we’re looking at.
Other funds like Forerunner, Upfront, HongShan, and True Ventures have not seen positive IRR on their funds from 2020 onward. (Forerunner’s 2018 and 2019 vintage funds have been marked up significantly.)
Both Y Combinator’s and Initialized Capital’s funds also only have negative IRR, but we only have data on the performances of their vintages from 2022 onward.
For the 2022 vintages, buzzy AI rounds have contributed to fast markups, and recent exits like Google’s Wiz acquisition will likely pad the numbers a bit further. The data we have for 2022 features several larger growth-stage funds, which see faster markups generally, says Kyle Stanford, PitchBook’s director of research for venture capital.
“Growth-stage funds should be investing in relatively higher-quality or less risky companies, and fewer portfolio companies should result in total losses,” Stanford notes.
“A greater proportion of the portfolio should also be raising new funding rounds, which can lead to increased valuations and markups, resulting in a faster increase in their IRR.”
A “standout” fund is relative across time, of course — venture capital funds in the 1990s during the peak of the dot com boom had IRR of over 100%. Those figures certainly put the quick markups of this recent AI boom into perspective, especially with many vintages still in the red.
An important caveat to our analysis: not all of the data were taken on the same dates in 2024. Some came from individual firms’ calculations of their own IRR while others came from their LPs. UTIMCO’s data is through Nov. 30 of last year, for example, while PSERS data is from March of last year, and the leaked data from Founders Fund runs through Q3 of last year. Data from Lightspeed and CalPERS runs through the end of last year.
Also, IRR is just part of the venture performance picture — it only tracks how funds are marking up their investments, rather than what’s been actually distributed back.
The data comes from records requests to University of Texas/Texas A&M Investment Management Company (UTIMCO), with fresh data from Pennsylvania’s Public School Employees Retirement System (PSERS), the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS), leaks of fund performance on X (thanks to everyone’s favorite anonymous account Arfur Rock), and Newcomer’s original reporting on Lightspeed’s fundraising efforts.