When Do LP Investors in VC Funds Actually Get Money Back

When Do LP Investors in VC Funds Actually Get Money Back

Author

Peter Walker

|

Read time: 

1 minute

Published date: 

July 23, 2025

Data from 366 US venture funds shows only about half of funds over 10 years old have returned 1x to LPs—making 10-year fund lifecycles optimistic for most...

LinkedIn: When Do LP Investors in VC Funds Actually Get Money Back

When do LPs in venture funds get their money back?

10 years is...optimistic 😅

Data below from 366 US venture funds that use Carta as their fund admin. The year indicates the year the fund began investing. The vast majority of these funds have less than $100M in committed capital.

So funds from 2011-2014 have all been in existence at least 10 years. And only about half of them have gotten to 1x DPI (aka we've returned the initial capital to our LPs).

Less than 1/3rd of 2015 funds are at 1x DPI or greater.

Less than 1/4th of 2016 funds are at 1x DPI or greater.

Less than 1/5th of 2017 funds are at 1x DPI or greater.

Venture capital = a long-term game in which average is not at all useful.

Of course given how long companies stay private these days, it's possible that some of these funds have major winners on their books that just haven't gotten to liquidity yet. Fingers crossed!

#VC #VCfunds #DPI #VCLPs

More data on fund performance in our latest report (covers 2,500+ VC funds): https://lnkd.in/eC77mj9P

Peter Walker
Author: Peter Walker
Peter Walker runs the Insights team at Carta, focused on discovering key data and narratives across the private capital ecosystem. In a former life, he was a marketing executive for a media analytics startup and led the data visualization team at the Covid Tracking Project.

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