A rising TVPI is not cash in an LP's account

The record

The Institutional Limited Partners Association maintains a standard Performance Template, with definitions released in January 2025, that funds use to report results to LPs. It defines Net TVPI — total value to paid-in capital — as an investor's share of a fund's quarter-end NAV plus all distributions made, divided by capital contributed: an unrealized number, NAV, in the same ratio as realized cash. Carta's Q1 2026 fund performance report, drawn from more than 2,700 venture funds it administers, shows what that mixing produces in practice: median net TVPI climbed for nearly every vintage from 2017 through 2024 over six quarters, even as cash actually returned to LPs stayed thin.

What the sources establish

Carta's report distinguishes the two components directly. TVPI "measures the value of both the realized and unrealized assets held by a VC fund," while distributions to paid-in capital, DPI, measures only "realized gains — the deals that actually put cash in investors' pockets." Median DPI for the 2019 and 2020 vintages is "still barely over zero," with fewer than half of those funds having returned any capital. Even the 2017 and 2018 vintages, the only recent cohorts with much DPI, have fewer than one in five funds past a 1x DPI — the point, Carta notes, "at which fund LPs start to earn a profit, rather than simply getting back the capital that they initially paid in." ILPA's formula explains why TVPI can rise anyway: it is driven by NAV, a valuation, not a cash event.

Scope and revision

ILPA's definition governs how a fund reports its own numbers each quarter; it is a reporting standard, not a market benchmark. Carta's figures cover only funds it administers and are stated as medians across vintages, which can obscure wide dispersion — the same report finds 90th-percentile net IRR across these vintages exceeds 20%, while the 75th percentile in every vintage sits at or below 15.5%. A TVPI rising toward a round number is not evidence a fund has crossed it in DPI, and TVPI itself can fall in a later quarter if marks are revised down, something the NAV-based half of the ratio permits and the cash-based half does not.

The decision in front of you

Editorially: an LP, a fund-of-funds allocator, or a GP raising a successor fund on cited performance should ask which of the two ratios is being quoted, and treat a strong TVPI on a young vintage as a valuation claim awaiting cash confirmation, not as a return already banked.

• Is the multiple being quoted TVPI, which includes unrealized value, or DPI, which counts only cash returned?
• How many funds in the cited vintage have reached even a 1x DPI?
• Is the figure a fund-level median, and if so, how wide is the spread beneath it?

Two funds can report the same TVPI while one has distributed real cash and the other has marked paper gains that have not yet been tested by a sale — the definitions make that distinction knowable, and the data cited here show the gap is currently wide.