Data-Driven Fund Forecasting

Every other industry runs financial planning and analysis. Venture capital, for the most part, still does not, and funds are managed from spreadsheets and backward looking reports. Anubhav Srivastava, founder of the fund forecasting platform Tactic, acquired by Carta roughly two weeks before this session, walked through what forward looking fund management actually requires.

Venture has never built an FP&A discipline. The founding insight in one line. Financial planning and analysis is standard practice everywhere else, which leaves fund managers running complex, long duration vehicles almost entirely from the rear view mirror.

The construction forecast as a living document. A shareable fund plan built from allocations, cheque sizes, follow on and ownership targets and probabilistic graduation and exit rate assumptions, with live market comparables pulled in to keep the model grounded in reality rather than optimism.

Continuous reconciliation of plan against actuals. As real portfolio data arrives the model tracks pacing, DPI, TVPI and valuations against the original plan, turning forecasting from a one off exercise for an LP deck into an ongoing operating discipline.

Optimal reserves, ranked and diagnostic. The platform surfaces which companies merit incremental reserve dollars based on expected return per dollar, framed explicitly as a tool to inform judgement rather than a black box that replaces it.

The one to one reserve ratio trap. One of the most common mistakes in LP decks. Assuming a one to one reserve ratio implicitly requires a graduation rate close to one hundred percent, which almost never holds in practice.

Graduation timing has quietly stretched. Seed to next round timing has moved from roughly eighteen months to twenty or twenty one months across the industry, which cascades directly into slower follow on pacing than most models still assume.

Most managers overestimate recyclable capital. Anubhav was candid that fund managers systematically overestimate how much capital they will actually recycle from early exits back into new investments inside the fund's active period.

• Anubhav Srivastava, Founder, Tactic.

This session was part of the IndianVCs Venture Summit, three days of conversations with more than twenty investors and allocators on LP fundraising, portfolio support, and the tools reshaping how funds operate. The full set of recordings lives on our YouTube channel.

The uncomfortable truth underneath the demo is that most funds do not know, in real time, whether they are on pace to hit their own return targets. The gap between the plan and the actuals is usually wider than the last LP deck admitted.