NVCA Today

On August 4, 2009, NVCA announced a strategic partnership with Cambridge Associates. Over a number of years, Cambridge Associates has been tracking the US venture capital fund information on behalf of its clients. The fund cash flow information and the underlying portfolio company cash flows have been carefully entered in their internal database. After many months of due diligence and hard work by NVCA's Research Committee, we are pleased to announce our strategic partnership with Cambridge Associates to provide comprehensive, independent U.S. venture capital performance statistics to a broad audience and provide immediate and longer term benefits to NVCA members. The press release can be viewed on the NVCA website.

Under the agreement, the NVCA will endorse the Cambridge Associates U.S. venture capital return benchmarks and together the organizations will offer quarterly IRR data and trend analysis to the public. Additionally, NVCA members will have access to enhanced, aggregate benchmark data through the Association's website. Here are some of the highlights of this new arrangement and what it means to our members:

• Beginning with Q1 2009, Cambridge Associates and NVCA are jointly releasing top level quarterly performance benchmarks to the media and NVCA members.
• These benchmarks will include more detailed metrics for venture capital performance including:
  • Quarterly US VC IRRs going back to 1980
  • Annual US VC IRRs going back to 1983
  • 1-year through 27-year horizon returns
  • Vintage year pooled, median, and quartile performance
  • Some fund segmentation vintage year returns
  • Gross IRRs by industry sector with special breakout of life science segments

• NVCA will post on its members only website an even more detailed benchmark report for member use
• Once programming is complete, NVCA will offer its members access to an online benchmark tool which will enable very detailed statistical query of the benchmarking statistics and the portfolio company gross IRR database. This will be a paid online subscription. Expected availability December 2009.

Our new relationship with Cambridge Associates will not impact our other research relationships. We will continue to deliver MoneyTree data with PricewaterhouseCoopers and Thomson Reuters. We will also continue to issue quarterly statistics on venture capital exits and fundraising with Thomson Reuters as well. NVCA clients of Thomson One Banker/VentureXpert will not be impacted in any way by this relationship. In fact, once subscriptions to the NVCA online benchmark tool become available, we would expect many members to subscribe to both Thomson Reuters VentureXpert and NVCA's benchmark tool (based upon data provided by Cambridge Associates).

With this new relationship, the NVCA seeks to bring even more responsible transparency, impeccability, and credibility to our industry. We have joined forces with a partner with robust data, reliable and proven systems, and a rock-solid reputation among all industry constituencies.

You will be hearing more about this exciting partnership in the coming months. In the meantime, do not hesitate to contact us with any questions. Contact John Taylor, NVCA VP of Research, at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .